The Simulator has landed
The Simulator is a new innovation facility to help RCA students and graduates to visualise their ideas. It has been set up in the Royal College of Art's Stevens Building by Design London, the RCA's joint venture with Imperial College. It now offers a unique creative asset for London - the capital's largest totally immersive 3D stereo environment.

Imagine translating your design from a computer screen or sketchpad to a life-size, high-definition, realistically rendered, three-dimensional image. An image so solid you can walk around it - or even move it through space as you reach out to touch it. An image you can manipulate in terms of materials, colour and form or see how it looks in a different context.
That is the capability of Design London's Simulator, which moved this spring into the Royal College of Art's Stevens Building. It now offers a unique new creative facility for London - the capital's largest totally immersive 3D stereo environment.

Five metres wide and three metres high and deep, the Design London Simulator enables designers to visualise products and services - from medical equipment to full-scale vehicles - and simulate how people might interact with them. It enables architects and interior designers to simulate user perceptions of space, and service designers to rehearse how services will be delivered and experienced by users.

The Simulator can help businesses and public sector organisations to innovate faster, lower design costs and reduce risk by experimenting in a fully simulated environment before committing to a final design, And it's available to students and researchers from all departments of the RCA - helping them to explore the very latest in visualisation and innovation technologies.

Design London also offers RCA designers and Imperial College's Engineering students a Fellowship to join the prestigious MBA programme at Imperial Business School for a joint course on design-led innovation and entrepreneurship.

This year, 52 students and recent alumni form both institutions have become Design London Fellows. They are all participating in a series of interdisciplinary team projects, taking innovative design concepts and turning them into investor-ready propositions.
Several of the teams are already using the Simulator to envision their ideas for new products, services and systems and have been testing them with end-users and potential customers - demonstrating the power of 3D stereoscopic visualisation to facilitate innovation.

Design London is also helping recent RCA and Imperial graduates to create new business ventures. So far, six new ventures have been launched in the Design London Incubator and all feature recent graduates from the RCA.

The Incubator takes promising design projects and turns them into entrepreneurial businesses using a proven incubation process. It provides investment of up to £100,00, along with access to the Simulator and other innovation technologies and expertise from its academic and industry partners. This interdisciplinary incubator is funded by NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Article by Nick Leon, Director of Design London