infrared.city

• For regulatory or high-stakes wind safety sign-off that requires jurisdiction-accepted traditional CFD studies and fully traceable boundary conditions.
• Where vegetation and its microclimate effects are central (evapotranspiration cooling or canopy wind-breaking effects) and must be modeled in detail now.
• Where procurement requires documented security certifications (SOC 2/ISO 27001) and the vendor cannot provide relevant compliance documentation.
• For teams seeking an ungoverned "push-button" solution: surrogate simulation outputs require governance, calibration, and clear understanding of limitations to avoid misplaced confidence.

• Wind is not yet fully integrated into the UTCI thermal comfort index; wind and thermal comfort are assessed in separate steps in current tooling.
• Vegetation evapotranspiration and vegetation-induced humidity feedback are not modeled at present.
• Trees are not currently treated as full wind obstacles in the wind model.
• Additional factors such as water features, anthropogenic heat, and explicit urban heat island intensity modeling are not fully integrated.

The vendor’s homepage includes named testimonials attributed to individuals and firms:

• Aaron Bud (SvN Architects + Planners) praising rapid optimization and design value.
• Alex Nakivell (SvN) noting integration into design software and solver workflows.
• Herman Calleja (SOM) noting early testing and support responsiveness.

These testimonials are attributed to identifiable firms and roles but are vendor-selected and not an independent sample of customer sentiment.

Vendor materials describe:

• An optimization workflow for mixed-use towers
• Reported outcomes: a reported reduction in areas exceeding wind speed thresholds (e.g., reductions in uncomfortable wind and very uncomfortable wind in a focus zone)
• Characterization of analysis runtime improvements compared to traditional CFD in vendor materials

Critical evaluation:

• Metrics are vendor-published; methodology details (baseline CFD settings, grid/meshing equivalence, statistical evaluation, weather data, and acceptance criteria) were not fully disclosed in accessible excerpts.
• The case is directionally plausible: faster iteration can support improved early massing decisions, although final sign-off may still require higher-fidelity validation.

The vendor documents a validation approach across multiple climate contexts (Stockholm, Vienna, Singapore) for UTCI computation, describing a framework using EPW climate files, geometry inputs, Radiance ray-tracing for view factors/irradiance, and mean radiant temperature (MRT) computation.

Critical evaluation:

• The documentation indicates the vendor is attempting to document model assumptions and validation approaches, which is informative.
• Vendor-authored validation is not a substitute for independent peer-reviewed benchmarking of the full product. The documentation also notes simplifications (e.g., simplified body representation and reflection simplifications).

infrared.city is a cloud-based platform that uses AI/ML methods to produce approximate environmental simulation outputs for urban microclimate and outdoor comfort analysis. The product is intended to provide faster early-stage design iteration than traditional specialist-run simulation workflows by producing near-real-time approximations for wind comfort, solar/radiation metrics, and thermal comfort indicators such as UTCI.

Core outputs and use cases referenced by the vendor include:

• Wind speed and pedestrian wind comfort
• Solar radiation / sunlight exposure
• Thermal comfort (UTCI) and heat/cold stress style metrics
• Automated, shareable climate reports and AI-written narrative summaries intended for stakeholders

These capabilities are accessible through a web application, and integrations into AEC tooling are offered via plugins/connectors (Rhino/Grasshopper, Revit; SketchUp and Speckle referenced as planned in some materials), plus an API for custom workflows.

Primary users: architects, urban designers/planners, sustainability consultants, and municipal/city stakeholders working on public realm, masterplanning, and climate-resilient urban design.

Positioning: The vendor positions the product as a way to reduce the need for specialist-run simulations during early-stage design and to shorten analysis turnaround times. This places infrared.city in the early-design sustainability analysis niche that overlaps with tools like Autodesk Forma and the broader simulation ecosystem, with an emphasis on speed and workflow integration.