Ideas From the Speckle Retreat Hackathon

This October, we packed our bags, fired up Google Maps, and headed south to the rolling hills and vineyards of Alentejo, Portugal, for our latest Speckle retreat.

The plan was to enjoy five days of hacking, brainstorming, and a healthy dose of shooting each other with paintballs.

The Speckle (Internal) Hackathon

Our second-ever internal hackathon meant we'd be stretching our preconceived notions of what Speckle is or will be and imagining more unique ways our platform can contribute to AEC in the future.

Here's an overview of the most notable hacks, including the winning hack, according to the popular vote!

The Winning Hack: Speckle Lens

This team created a "Speckle Data Lens"; a new way to simplify data analysis within the Speckle viewer. They aimed to make automation and visualisation seamless for all users - developers and non-developers alike.

What they built

• Data Lens UI: A new frame for visualising data.
• Material Analysis Automation: Triggered by Speckle Automate, delivering real-time insights.
• Interactive Visualisation: Charts that dynamically filter model elements based on analysis results.
• Model Grouping: A new custom viewer behaviour that bucket-sorts model elements according to the selected criteria.

How it works

Here’s how Speckle Data Lens works—super simple on the surface, magic happening underneath:

1. Add Visual: A user adds a visual to the viewer.
2. Deploy as Automation: The visual automatically triggers an Automate function behind the scenes.
3. Trigger Run: This function runs in the background, processing the data for the chosen visualisation.
4. Consume Results: Results from the automation are delivered directly to the visual.
5. Interact: Users can interact with the visual, filtering and exploring model data seamlessly.

All the heavy lifting happens invisibly, keeping the experience smooth!

Value propositions

Effortless Automation: Automation is integrated seamlessly, requiring no user input to trigger complex data analysis, making insights accessible without needing technical skills.

Real-Time, Interactive Visualisation: Users get direct, dynamic, real-time visual feedback from the viewer, enabling them to interact with the data without jumping between different tools.

All-In-One Platform: Everything happens within Speckle, without external software like PowerBI—streamlined data analysis, visualisation, and interaction all in one place.

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Post-Hackathon further work: A word from the Winners

Encouraged by many kind words from others in Speckle, after the hackathon, we have continued to explore several directions:

• No full UI framework: We’ll allow authors to build their UI with vanilla JS. An Automate function will define a Function Outputs class to mirror the existing Function Inputs UI hoisting mechanism.
• No dashboard builder: Our focus is on bespoke function-result integration, ensuring that each function works closely with its results. Sophisticated interactions and visualisation are simply out of PowerBI's reach. e.g.
• Structural Load Path Visualisation: Visually trace load paths through a structure, dynamically adjusting for changes in load distribution based on different configurations or material properties.
• Geospatial Risk Heatmaps: Overlay flood, seismic, or wind risk data onto site models, visualising the impact of environmental factors on infrastructure projects.
• Time-Based Structural Deformation Analysis: Visualise and animate how a structure deforms over time under specific loads, helping to identify potential issues before construction.
• Material Stress Distribution: Interactive stress and strain maps highlight material fatigue or overloading areas in real-time as different loads are applied to the structure.
• Bridge Vibration Mode Simulation: This is a real-time visualization of vibration modes in bridge structures, showing how different design configurations impact dynamic performance.
• Dynamic 4D Simulation: Visualise not just the current state of the model but progress over time, showing how materials, costs, or carbon footprints change as a project evolves.
• Cross-Disciplinary Data Overlay: Integrate data from architecture, structural engineering, and MEP systems into a single visualisation, showing live relationships between different domains in real-time.
• Multi-Criteria Optimisation Heatmaps: Use visual heatmaps to highlight optimal vs. suboptimal areas within a building, dynamically adjusted based on metrics like cost, sustainability, and structural efficiency.
• Real-Time Validation Rules: Dynamically apply and display validation rules (e.g., clearance checks, structural spacing) across models with clear pass/fail feedback.
• Data Completeness Heatmap: Visualise missing or incomplete data fields within the model, highlighting potential QA/QC risks.
• Design Code Compliance Checks: Visualise where designs fail to meet specific local codes or standards with actionable, contextualised feedback.
• Guidelines: Keep visuals intuitive, emphasising simplicity and stability, especially for public visualisations.
• Next-gen connectors: With Automate results now able to be consumed in the authoring tool connectors UI, why not the visuals?

Want to see this hack become a part of Speckle? Let us know in the Community Forum!

Speckle AI hack: SpeckleBot for Everyone

This team's project aims to tackle one of Speckle’s biggest challenges: navigating the vast aounts of data it handles.

Whether you're an advanced user or a newcomer, the sheer volume of information can be overwhelming.

That's why their solution focused on improving the user and client experience by enhancing data accessibility for both technical and non-technical users with the tagline: "Speckle’s data shouldn’t just be available—it should be accessible, actionable, and impactful for everyone."

It should be noted that models and construction data can be overwhelming.  In order to create a chat bot with knowledge of the model, a new pipeline for model data would need to be created.  

This pipeline would extract and transform the data into a format that can be better queried to be used with a number of off the shelf LLMs.  This would allow us to keep data transport by using open source LLMs.

Speckle Onboarding Hack

The team wanted to find  a way to move as many user interactions as possible to the web-based interface. Onboarding process is the first time new users interact with Speckle and they should be able to experience the most benefits as fast as possible.

The goals:

• Decrease friction from sign up to meaningful action
• Make users experience the “aha” moment faster
• Empower any non-technical user to get the value of Speckle in seconds

That’s why the team opted for giving new users an option of using pre-loaded sample data without any external downloads to get to a meaningful action quickly.

The second part of the proposition was a more personalised email onboarding journey pointing users in the right direction according to their project needs but encouraging them to think broadly and explore Speckle solutions they didn't even know could be beneficial to them at that time.

Our connectors, the web app and Speckle Automate all work together, and users who approach Speckle holistically will get the most out of it!

Would you be happy to see this onboarding in action one day?

Live Sessions: Rhino Multiplayer Hack

This team of Speckler were asking themselves how can they make it easier for two Rhino users to work on the same model at the same time?

Their starting arguments were:

• Collaborative modelling isn’t smooth
• No Speckle: Export → Send → Import → Repeat
• With Speckle: Manually sending and receiving
• You don't know what the other person is doing
• Slow feedback loops are bad for the design process

Hence, they demoed Live Sessions meant for auto-sending and auto-receiving changes done to a Rhino model.

This essentially lets you watch what your teammate is doing live, improving ease of collaboration.

Interested in this approach? We're always eager to talk about it in the Community Forum!

Wrapping It Up

Great things happen when you get Specklers together, and some of those things end up as initiatives which will turn into something that will make your work even easier. So stay tuned to find out which of these hacks will come to life!

Love, your Speckle team.

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