Why this exists
I spent more than a decade working in architecture and computational design. Every company I worked with had the same problem: the feasibility phase was held together with duct tape.
The tools were fine individually. SketchUp for massing. Excel for areas. Another Excel for finance. A GIS portal for site data. Rhino if you wanted precision. Grasshopper if you felt fancy. PowerPoint to present it all. Nothing talked to anything else. Every iteration meant touching every file. Every design change broke a formula somewhere.
BIM solved the production phase. Nobody solved feasibility.
That is why Projected exists.
What we set out to do
One interface where you define site constraints, generate massing, experiment with floor plans, simulate performance, and export to BIM. No file conversion. No context switching. No copy-pasting numbers between tools.
Simple to describe. Not simple to build.
What made it hard
A 3D design tool that runs in the browser is harder than it sounds. We needed the responsiveness of a desktop CAD application but accessible from anywhere, no install. That means handling parametric geometry updates, boolean operations on meshes, and rendering thousands of elements while keeping frame rates stable. Every architectural interaction (splitting a volume, adjusting a setback, punching a courtyard) has to resolve instantly and produce clean, exportable geometry downstream. We rewrote the geometry kernel twice before landing on an approach that held up under real project complexity.
Real-time compliance is computationally expensive. When you move a slider to add a floor, we recalculate setbacks, daylight access, overlooking distances, GFA, FAR, unit counts, and financial feasibility simultaneously. Getting that to feel instant (sub-200ms) required rethinking how we structure the dependency graph between parameters. We ended up building a custom reactive computation engine that only recalculates what actually changed.
Design generation is not the same as optimization. Early on we experimented with pure optimization: define constraints, let the system find the best solution. Architects hated it. They do not want an answer. They want to explore a space of answers. So the design studio had to feel like a creative tool with intelligent guardrails, not a solver that hands you a result.
Export sounds trivial until you try it. Generating a file with correct geometry is straightforward. Generating one that a structural engineer can actually use in Revit, with proper levels, room boundaries, wall types, and metadata, is a different problem entirely. We spent months talking to engineers and BIM managers to get the output right.
Where we are today
The platform handles residential feasibility end to end. You go from an empty site to a validated, export-ready design in a single session. The four modules (Site Intelligence, Design Studio, Simulation, IO) work as one connected workflow.
We are launching with:
- Environmental data aggregation
- 3D massing with parametric controls
- AI-assisted floor plan generation
- Daylight and shadow simulation
- 3DM, DXF, and Excel export
- PDF Reporting
- Interactive share links for stakeholders
What comes next
We are not done. A few things on the roadmap:
- More design tools. Better geometry handling, more flexible workflows for complex sites.
- Deeper environmental simulation. Wind comfort, acoustics, embodied carbon.
- Better generation models. More robust single-floor apartment layouts, less manual cleanup.
- AI-driven visualization. Context-aware renders directly from your massing, useful for early stakeholder conversations.
- Collaborative workflows. Multiple team members on the same project simultaneously.
Try it
We are offering 14 days free with full platform access. No feature gating. No credit card required.
If you run feasibility studies and want to see what this looks like on a real site, start here.
If you have questions, feedback, or want to show us a workflow we have not considered, reach out at [email protected]. We are building this with practitioners, not in isolation.