I found this by accident last year but it dates from 2005. It’s still pretty damn cool if you haven’t ever seen it. One wonders what ever happened to this, it’s surely has a commercial application, even with or without the whiteboard and projector. It would be a great application to have on a Tablet PC, although I can’t say I’ve seen that many Tablet PCs in actual use (the first ones were a little bit crap from memory).

If only all CAD systems were this easy to use and powerful, mind you i think there would be lots of 2D ‘games’ developed with the physics engine by bored engineers and students. If this kind of tool was available in schools surely we would be able to get more kids interested in science?

The system was created using three different technologies:

• Working Model 2D v.2005
• Mimio Whiteboard Capture System by Virtual Ink
• ASSIST sketch understanding system pioneered by MIT Professor Randall Davis

Seems like Josh over at SolidSmack.com got to it first, but this looks sweet. Its a hacked together rear projection unit with some fancy bits and bobs running on Vista. What’s interesting is the multi-touch manner. A lot of the CAD vendors are talking about this as the future - SolidWorks went multi-touch crazy at their press event preceding the last SolidWorks World. I wonder how it could be packaged up - maybe some sort of hand held device like the Wacom’s Cintiq maybe. One thing’s for sure, we all ain’t gonna be standing in front of a wall to get the job done are we?

As a recent convert to the Apple platform and owner of a macbook air, I have to say multi touch is pretty compelling - as this technology develops, its going to be interesting to see how its implemented in CAD systems. Of course, most of my work is done on a big old workstation running windows, but I do my writing on OSX.. but if I do fancy designing something, I now have the early test version of Rhino for the Mac - and that has multi-touch implemented in a very subtle manner.

I don’t really want this to turn into a book review blog, but there have been some amazing publications in the last few years. One of my personal favourites is Designing Interaction by IDEO founder, Bill Moggridge. For anyone involved in design, in product development, its chock full of interview and studies of how designers are adapting to accomodate how users interact with their products, be that by software, hardware - whatever. One of my favourite chapters is an interview with Kenji Hatori, a software engineer at Canon who developed PhotoStitch. It describes the stitch assist mode for cameras and Rikako recounts the process used to design the screen behaviors for the PhotoStitch software, with a clear structure indicated by tabs and actions clarified by animations. The book is supplied with a DVD that’s worth sitting a watching (and yup, boring your families with) - a great deal can be learned. You can see a video of the interview here.

If we’re to develop truly stunning products, whatever field they are active in, then the whole user experience needs to be address - and its something that CAD vendors should take note of - more so now than every before. The technology we use to develop products seems to be getting easier to handle, but without some form of forethought, some sort of rationalisation, its all for nothing. and again, the question of whether the Microsoft Ribbon UI is the way forward spring to mind. We develop in 3D - should our tools follow the same UI characteristics as Word, Excel and Outlook. Familiarity is the reason that vendors have jumped all over it. the argument being that if you can drive Word or Outlook, you can drive SolidWorks, SpaceClaim, Inventor et al. I’m not convinced.http://www.designinginteractions.com/

Desktop Engineering is a magazine I’ve written a lot for over the past few years and its odd that I never actually get to read the paper version. But anyway, I like Mike Hudspeth’s comment peice this month, on the relationship between Industrial Design and 3D design tools. Just because you have the tools, doesn’t mean you’re any good at it - something i couldn’t agree with more.

“First, and perhaps most important of the myths, is that anyone can do industrial design. After all, it’s just about styling, right? Wrong. Not everyone can design.”

“Industrial design is a whole lot more than meets the eye. It takes into account how things work and what the target audience needs — with an eye turned to their expectations. Customer psychology plays a huge part. Industrial design also has to do with responsibility — to one’s customers as well as to the environment. Safety issues are very important. And form doesn’t always follow function. Sometimes a product cries out for an artistic re-imagining to reinvigorate it and save it from sheer market boredom.”

Its not a case of trying to protect a career, or trying to protect a field of specialism, but one of training, of research, and shear bloody talent. Just because you have a set of paints, you’re not a good painter. And the same goes, just because you have a 3d design tool that includes surface modelling, G3 curvature continuity, does mean you’re an industrial designer.

Nice one Mike.

I’ve been plugging through everything I’ve learned so far about Synchronous Technology, so here it is. The essential difference between Synchronous Technology and other systems out there that many are comparing it with (let’s be frank, that’s SpaceClaim, CoCreate and to a much less extent, IronCAD), is not so much the ability to interact directly with geometry, but rather the manner in which you add intelligence to your 3D product model.

When we design a product, we have two things in mind. What it looks like, whether in terms of aesthetic quality, but also that it need to fit and provide a certain function, and that’s often governed by form - after all, parts need to interact with those around them. But alongside this, you also need to be able to specify how a product is formed. Rough dimensions don’t cut it, you need to be able to tie information down, lock it out and ensure that the geometry you create fulfills a need, for function and performance.

In traditional history based systems, the latter part is much easier, as you are defining geometry from a very root level, which captures your design intent - but only just. the fact that you often have to add excessive dimensions and constraints at a feature/sketch level, means that the process is counter intuitive. In other words, history-based modeling is too over burdened.

What it DOES give you is the ability to add a lot of intelligence, so design change can be automated, dimensions and constraints interlinks between sketches, features, parts and sub-assemblies. But the end result is a dataset that’s horrendously complex and effecting even a small change can result in a parametric nightmare that take herculean effort to resolve - and in many cases, user remodel from scratch just to avoid it.

Direct Editing applications (such as CoCreate and SpaceClaim), work from the other end, where you play with the geometry and the constraints you apply (be they dynamically input, or more commonly, just a case of drag and drop geometry) are not maintained and stored. So, you can add dimensions if you need to, but they can’t be maintained and commonly accessed at a later date.

What Siemens has done is develop an architecture in which you can mix and match both. you can play with geometry to get it into shape, to ensure that the rough state of your model is how you want it. you can make changes very quickly indeed, by using inferred relationships, dynamic detection of ‘informal’ topology relationships - such as concentricity, parallelism, perpendicularity. this just enables to you edit the geometry and topology very quickly. But the trick is that when time comes to lock down feature size, dimensions, constraints, you can do is, just as you do already BUT, you can maintain them. Dimensions remain consistent, are stored and accessible, features are maintained, in respect to the dimensions, rules, constraints you provide.

But

They are applied after the geometry has been built - and this is key. you design, then you engineer. For me, the most interesting illustration i could find is the one shown here. its a model with parametric dimensions, but one that’s fully constrained - but the difference is that the ONLY dimensions, parameters and constraint you create, are the important ones - that, is the crux of the point and key to understanding what Siemens have developed.

Its a complex thought process to figure this out, with over 20 years of parametric, history-based modeling that the majority of us are familiar with and it’ll take time to settle and learn more.

NOTE: it’s been pointed out that I left Kubotek and its products out of these articles. Apologies to the guys over here.

One thing I’ve been thinking about of late is the new breed of modeling technology that’s clearly coming on stream, which allows you to work with geometry in a very freeform, unrestricted manner. If, you can load a part or assembly, then edit it, without recourse to the construction history, you have the ability to edit a part without having knowledge about how it was constructed. And believe me, I think that’s a good thing, when the tools finally get there, it means that we’ll be able to concentrate on design and engineering, rather that operation of software.

But…

The benefit of history and features is that you are storing the intelligence in your model, of how you construct the part, how you design it. With the rise of more intelligent features and such, you can store a great deal more information about the design intent, the process you went through to create those forms. In other words, the CAD model, at present, reflection a big portion of your intellectual property.

While its a royal pain in the arse, it also means that if you’re working in a supply chain, you can protect your intellectual property to a large extent, because of this complexity. If a design change needs to be made, then the customer has to come back to you and your design team to effect that change, because, they have the knowledge of how it was constructed. and for many organizations, that consultative role is a source of revenue and on-going business.

If this new breed of modeling tool does not rely on that recipe that you store, and anyone can load the part, edit the information it represents, then that revenue might be lost.

Absolutely, I’m absolutely aware that the intellectual property held within a CAD system is the end result of the process, rather than the be-all and end-all of your organization’s skills, the fact remains that this is something that more and more organizations are going to have to accept and deal with. How do you protect your data? what tools are available to ensure that your intellectual property is protected. Does is mean that the integration of Digital Right Management tools, such as LivePolicy from Adobe are the way to go, or as Bruce Boes of Siemens PLM Software commented in an interview I conducted recently, “This is something that should be rationalised with the security capabilites within your software, whether that’s through your PDM system or through your CAD system”- it all that remains to be seen.

Its an interesting concept and I think something the industry as a whole is going to have to face up to at some point and I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject.