How to use it
This is the on-screen analogue of Brown & DeKay's sundial: instead of laying a printed dial on a cardboard model and tilting it into real sun, you scrub the date and solar-time sliders and the simulator casts shadows for the sun's true position at your latitude. North is up. Drag buildings (any of the CBECS standard footprints — square, wide and narrow rectangle, courtyard, H, U, E, T, L and cross) and trees to lay out a site; set each object's height and rotate buildings 90° to test orientation — shadow length is height ÷ tan(sun altitude), so it stretches dramatically near sunrise and sunset and shrinks toward summer noon.
The classic workflow: check 9 AM, noon and 3 PM (the quick buttons) on Jan 21 (coldest) and Jul 21 (hottest) to see whether a shadow falling on your site is an asset or a liability across the year — then test massing or a neighbour's building before committing. It shares its solar geometry with the Sun Path Diagram; this view trades the dome for the ground plane, where the shadows actually land.