From Shop Floor to Software : CAD

CAD in Japan

Leslie_Gordon — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:10:00 GMT

I'm at the SolidWorks 2009 conference in Orlando, Florida, looking out my hotel room window, which oversees a lake lined with palm trees, the Swan Resort with giant statures of swans on its rooftop, and blue, sunny skys. I heard it is warmer in Cleveland, but I am in no rush to get back home to snow, ice, and near zero temperatures.

Yesterday, I spoke with Haruyoshi Iida, President and CEO of SolidWorks Japan K.K. He says the CAD system first came to Japan in 1995 when Jon Hershtik made sure to introduce a localized version for the language. Interestingly, SolidWorks has an large presense in Japan, he says, with about 80,000 seats, 40,000 of which are commercial. Mr. Iida says Japan has 300,000 manufacturing companies, mostly heavy industry. Many of these companies still use 2D, but industry is slowly moving to 3D. He says Japanese companies are not "in a big rush."

SolidWorks World 2009 -- Day 1 & 2

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:22:00 GMT

According to CEO Jeff Ray, over 4,000 people are attending the SolidWorks World 2009 event being held in Orlando, Florida over the next few days. Although times are tough, that is not evident at this show. Attendees are upbeat and the theme "innovation" predominates. The Great Depression spawned nylon, car radios, and everyone's favorite -- SPAM. Today's big problems can be addressed by yet more innovative designs. Take for example modern windmills, which came out of a need for sustainable energy. Many people don't want them in their back yards and the devices are expensive. Still in the concept phase is a 3 to 4-ft tall windmill that would fit on a house rooftop and generate enough energy for the house. Another problem: many people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. A company has invented a device that bombards drinking water with UV light, cleaning the water without the use of chemicals or chlorine. Fifty of the devices are currently being deployed near N.Y.C., enough to fill the Empire State Bldg. eight times a day with water.

Sir Richard Branson spoke on the first day. For a guy worth billions of dollars, he is quite personable, humble, and has a wicked sense of humor. He has started another company -- Virgin Galactic Airways -- because he thinks commercial space aviation will become a reality. His suggestions for combatting a tough economy:

-- Expand out of it instead of contracting. If you can afford to, continue to innovate.
-- Before just laying people off explore the alternatives such as job sharing. There might be employees who would really appreciate only having to work a few days a week such as ones with small children.

Branson says America is quite protectionist, which translates to anti-innovative. "We must get rid of all the barriers in the world," he says. He is a big fan of Obama.

Day Two, Jon Hirshtick, the former CEO of SolidWorks, spoke on what he says will be the technologies most important in affecting CAD in the future:

-- Touch and motion UIs. A lot of industrial designers already use Wacon Tablets, like a big computerized drawcuesing pad that imports Photoshop files, and draw directly on them.
-- CAD will become a hardware business again in that more and more users will be using hardware specifically designed for CAD such as the 3D mouse.
-- Online applications will get even more prevelant. Already have an application on SolidWorks Labs (labs.solidworks.com) to create 2D drawings which can be accessed by many devices including cell phones.
-- Video gaming technology will get increasingly prevelant in CAD. Features such as ambient occlusion are already in CAD that have been borrowed from video games. Many graphic gards now have more transistors on them than CPUs.
-- 3D printing will become a key part of the design process and be used iteratively.

Other speakers mentioned how industrial design uses "styling cues" from other areas of society to get ideas for designs. Industrial designers choose a "form language" they are interested in for different products.

Check out smoothon.com for material that lets you rapidly mold things using, say, a 3D printed mold.

BoardCAD.com is a free download for making surface models for things like surfboards.

More than just user-centric, design nowadays must be desire-centric. This even applies to machine design which can borrow techniques from consumer design.

The film boiling of water

Leslie_Gordon — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 02:07:00 GMT

Check out this neat animation created in COMSOL multiphysics software that studies the film boiling of water. The "Leidenfrost point" referred to is the lowest temperature at which a hot body submerged in a pool of boiling water is completely blanketed by a vapor film. There is a minimum in the heat flux from the body to the water at this temperature. The animation shows the fluids volume fraction over time as a surface and contour plot. In CFD, volume of fluid (VOF) method is a numerical technique for tracking and locating the free surface (or fluid-fluid interface).

BOMs ... BORs?

Leslie_Gordon — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:47:00 GMT

Day Two of PTC event. Improved support for top-down methodology: Info from ProductPoint and other stuff can be stuffed into Pro/E, and then worry about the component's fitting, etc. Windchill Web 2 look for Windchill -- clean and crisp. More AJAX and DHTML widgets. Create requirements as objects in Winchill, organize into structures as a Bill of Requirements. Then tie that in to system requirements. Generate traceability matrices. Manage changes to requirements. Requirements are thus tied into the same system, Windchill 9.1 (mid-09).

New ideas in conceptural engineering -- the layout of the product. Can't get to the next level of problem solving in 2D. Customers want the flexibilty and speed of 2D that morphs into 3D. This is for Wildfire 6. Windchill MPMLink to manage manufacturing resources. The factory itself is the product.

From paper docs to product information delivery: Evolution of Arbortext (in 2010). Paper documents.....Electronic documents........Product information delivery: user manuals; complaince reports; training; service contracts; spare parts catalogs, illustrated and electronic.

To come in the future: Innovation management in Windchill and crowd sourcing (mass collaboration) capbailities supported by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

2009 PTC Annual Global and Media Analyst Event

Leslie_Gordon — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:08:00 GMT

Boston is sunny but cold -- a nice break from our gloomy Cleveland winter and its excessive snowfalls. PTC is holding its annual media event at the company's Needham corporate headquarters. Attending are about 100 to 150 media analysts and a few trade journalists from Japan, Italy, Germany, and the U.S., among other countries.

Part of day one:

Dick Harrison, President and CEO spoke on PTC's corporate strategy: He says PTC's business is good and it has made 241 million so far this quarter. All the channel partners and salesmen are optomistic about the "product development solution (PDS)." This is shorthand for PTCs various applications such as Pro/E, Windchill, Arbortext, and Mathcad, etc. Harrison says EADS in Europe, which had used SAP is switching to the PDS. He also says PTC recently got a 20,000-seat order from Samsung. Spending is difficult in a tough economy, but customers are focused on PLM: They want to globalize and have shorter lead times; they want to automate the product-design process. Harrison says the high-end CAD market is saturated for large enterprise customers. Standalone CAD is a thing of the past. Companies need PLM for global collaboration. Many U.S. companies are outsourcing detailed design (CAD). Product Point (basically a version of Windchill on Microsoft's Share Point) targets SMBs with CAD and PDM. Harrison says PTC is just as big as SolidWorks and Autodesk in the SMB space. PTC is not laying off any of its salesforce. China is its second-largest market for emerging geographies. SAP, Dassalt, and Seimens are all European based. PTC just bought Synapsis (compliance software for EU standards).

Jim Heppelmann, Chief Product Officer says the modular approach to the PDS means that SMBs can now have analysis, surfacing, and CAM capabilities. He defines programs that are "integrated" means they are engineered to work together. CADDS -- old Computer Visions Technology -- is now for ship building. CoCreate -- explict modeling tool. Pro/E is growing in SMBs; Mathcad, Arbortext usually for larger companies. ProductView; InSight; ProductPoint works with SharePoint and can also work with the complete Windchill. InSight is the new name to the Synapsis acquisition (takes a BOM and performs a chemical analysis of each part to see if they don't comply with a specification such as REACH, RoHs, and other compliance standards). The beginning of a platform for BOM analytics.

According to Heppelmann, SharePoint is like the "new Windows" in that soon everyone will be using it. It's a "social-computing" platform. ProductPoint is for small workgroups that need to vault and share structured information, and for Windchill customers. SharePoint is the fastest growing product in Microsoft history. Discussion forums, wikis, blogs, RSS, IM... Social computing and Web 2.0 -- came out of a social community. Gives people a way to work togeter. Web.1 was HTTP; HTML; and Java. SharePoint is platform for social networking for a business community. Wildfire 5 will be optimized for social computing. ProductView: graphics provides a visual front end so you can, for instance, see which part of the assembly is not compliant. Can do a graphical search, or a digital mockup inside a Power Point slide, for examples.

Windows SharePoint manages office documents. ProductPoint bolts on top of it. Can work with CAD structures, even Mathcad and Arbortext structures. Also other appplications such as Autodesk. Has Microsoft Ribbons UI. Lets engineers see an aggregation of information from a bunch of different sources. PLM Connector -- shares information between PLM solutions (manufacturer's and supplier's portal). Maintains PLM information. Is used with Product Point to integrate with other systems. ProductPoint only requires SharePoint or MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server).

Microsoft: Also designs all its products in Pro/E. Office SharePoint Server (platform). Collaboration = blogs, wikis, rss reeds, social networks, tagging, social bookmarking, mashups, and personal profiles. "Social Computing." SharePoint and ProductPoint together can automate the distribution of media. Works in the background to generate almost everything about "My Site." Can search for collegues by social distance. Can keep up to date with people in a hands-off manner. Retiring work force walks out the door with valuable information: Use Wikis as a way to create pride in people that are leaving (their name is on the article) and provide a familiar interface for young engineers. Pod-casting kit for SharePoint -- record and publish infomation on media players, Web pages, and the like.

Old DWG, New BIM?

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:01:00 GMT

CAD at the Venetian Resort

Autodesk is again hosting its annual Autodesk University (AU) event at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. It's still pretty early, so things haven't yet geared up. The developer must have sympathy for those of us who travel a distance to get here and thus are still reeling from jetlag -- the keynote speech from CEO Carl Bass is not slated to start until around
10 am! Most similar venues have attendees getting up around 7 am.

Anyway, I absolutely love the Venetian Resort, especially the fake "Venice" that comprises a series of fancy shops and resturants, a real canal full of real water, and gondoliers dressed in the traditional red and white striped shirts. Some of my collegues hate Las Vegas because it is so sleazy. I don't gamble but I love the neon lights and the glitter. But you can sense a heart of darkness: I've been told that there are shops where desperate gamblers can pawn their cars, recreational vehicles, and even home mortgages.

Old DWG, New BIM

At the registration area is a large board that attendees can use to post their idea on how to get a more sustainable

world. Ideas: Share our vehicles, Go local; Turn off the lights; Build digitally; Use solar wind and energy. And -- my favorite -- "Old .DWG, new BIM." BIM is a big buzz in architectural circles lately. It stands for Building Information Modeling and is said to be a term that was coined by Autodesk to mean "3D, object-oriented, AEC-specific CAD." Of course, DWG is the traditional drawing format. Can you teach an old DWG new tricks, er, that is to be a BIM?

Ideas on Innovation

Tom Kelly, co-founder of design company IDEO spoke at this morning's keynote session. He says, design is not superficial, it is strategic. It creates value. It can make the difference between love and hate. If you wanna' innovate, you have to design. Now you have to out-innovate the rest of the world. It is like the Red Queen effect from Alice in Wonderland. We are running, but we are not getting anywhere. So you have to run twice as fast. What if we are first, or perhaps the best? IDEO designs: From the Apple mouse to helping the Red Cross redesign the experience of donating blood.

What works in innovation and what doesn't? His book: The Ten Faces of Innovation. Learn from other people's failures. His mistake: The human brain can handle only 7 bits of information at a time. So don't talk about the 10 top faces.... talk about the 2:

Designs used to be driven by specifications and technical challenges. The Anthropologist would go to lakes and streams and come and tell us about it. This is a source of innovation. The act of discover is in seeing with new eyes. In the process of developing expertise, most designers start filtering out new experiences. Vuga de -- the opposite of deja vu. Start to ask questions differently. For example, Oral B wanted to innovate around kid's toothbrushes. IDEO started with anthropology -- every toothbrush in the world had the implicit assumption that kids' toothbrushes should be a small version of their parents. Kids actually hold toothbrushes differently and needed big, squishy toothbrushes. Had best selling toothbrush in the world for 18 months until others caught up.

Next is the Experience Architect. He thinks about the total experience the customer has. Good book -- The Experience Economy.

For example making a birthday cake:

Commodity way -- Mom goes out and buys stuff to make a birthday cake. Cheap, but a lot of work and a lot of risk.

Product way -- Betty Crocker makes the batter. More expensive, but saves a lot of time.

Service level -- Go to a bakery and buy a ready-made cake that squirts the kid's name on it. No risk. Expensive

Chuckie Cheeses -- Terrible in many ways except you can be a hero for your kids that day if you pay big bucks for a Chuckie Cheese party. Parents are willing to pay almost anything. No risk.

How to get an idea: Find an opportunity hidden in plain sight. For instance, the Westin Hotel and its Heavenly Bed. No one else had thought to design around the businessmen who flies in late, goes to bed and goes to work early (not around the spa and pool crowd).

Use simplicity as a tool. The simpler as the better. Aspire to the "wet-nap interface" of moist towelettes. Just tear open and use.

New trends to check out -- "algorithimic design," and biomimicry

SolidWorks 2009, Barcelona, Spain

Leslie_Gordon — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:25:00 GMT

SolidWorks just held its annual Media event in Barcelona, Spain to showcase Version 9. The city is a pastel jewel full of palm trees, international travelers, and mind-blowing architecture by Gaudi. I took a stroll earlier on the boardwalk by the Mediterranean Sea. People here are quite sophisticated -- a topless beach nearby brought not one single stare. There are plenty of long-haired Spanish beauties, but to balance things out, there are also millions of buff young hulks.

Back to business....SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray in his opening speech says in a global economy with new players such as India and China, the best products have a high quality, low manufacturing cost, new fuctionality, better performance, and high customer satisfaction.

He also explains that the recent company name change -- SolidWorks is now officially Dassault Systemes SolidWorks -- symbolizes a closer working relationship between the companies. Dassault can benefit from SolidWorks' strong reseller channel, and SolidWorks can benefit from Dassault 3D and PLM technology. Although SolidWorks and CATIA are each CAD programs, they target different markets, says Ray. "CATIA is big in aerospace and some automotive. You have to respect the way the customer does business," he says. "You can't get caught in the trap of believing your own bullshit or marketing hype."

Ray notes a convergence between gaming technology and design, so the company is buying a lot of gaming IP. The goal is customer satisfaction, and -- always -- profit. "Profit is an instantiation of the customer's belief in you," he says. Ray also says soon computing will be done "in the cloud," with programs such as SolidWorks online.

Probably one of the most interesting customer presentations was that of PAL Technology in Abu Dhabi. It has developed a humanoid robot that walks, talks, sits on chairs, holds a cup and pours coke in it, and the like. The robot also recognizes faces, self-localizes, and plans its path to avoid obstacles. Check out the robot

Free download of CoCreate

Leslie_Gordon — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:06:00 GMT

Interestingly, PTC is now offering a free download of CoCreate personal version. As you recall, not long ago, PTC -- well known for inventing history-based modeling -- purchased CoCreate, an explicit or non-history-based modeler. PTC says the download provides the world's first free explicit 3D CAD software. Users work directly on geometry they want to modify and can design models with no upfront engineering. This helps to create lightweight designs fast.

Download CoCreate

COFES 2008

Leslie_Gordon — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:13:00 GMT

Attending the COFES 2008 (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) conference has been a nice surprise. For one thing, the event is being held at the beautiful Scottsdale Plaza Resort near Phoenix, Arizona. Think bright blue skies, hot sunny days, and unusual fauna such as the bottle brush tree, which has what looks like thousand of red, bristly bottle brushes hanging from its branches.

For another thing, the event is way more intellectually oriented than are most trade shows. That sounds boring, but is in fact, quite inspiring. Here are a few of the things I have seen and heard, in no particular order: Karl Ulrich from the Wharton School of the Univ. of Pennsylvania gave a talk that could have easily been titled: Quantifying innovation. He qualifies extreme innovation as something that makes a lot of $$ and gave the example of the Oral B toothbrush, which has the largest market share in the world of any toothbrush. The company used what is called a "tournament structure" to come up with the best design: designers generated hundreds of ideas; the company made models of the best 50 and tested them with consumers. Out of this came the best five. The company tested these thoroughly in the lab using mirrors to watch participants brush their teeth from every angle. The winner was the now widely known brush with a co-molded handle.

Pixar used the same method to pick a movie to make. The company got 500 one-sentence pitches and out of these picked the best, "A hot-rod racecar gets waylaid in the desert and finds the meaning of friend and family." This resulted in the movie Cars. He also says tournaments are not always needed. A good example is the problem, "What should a roof beam look like in engineering software?" This problem and others like it only take one or two passes to solve. Ulrich says Six Sigma is the wrong logic for innovation because it aims to produce the same thing the same way every time. Instead, it is better to think of innovation statistically using the tournament framework to:

-- Take more draws from a larger distribution
--Shift the mean of the quality of ideas upwards
--Increase the variance in the qualities
--Increase accuracy in evaluating opportunities

In one case, this method produced a money-making idea from an Indian doctor -- that of brokering "medical tourism" for semi-elective surgery.

Coming soon: A new RP format that replaces STL

Live from Autodesk World Press Day 2008, San Francisco

Leslie_Gordon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:19:00 GMT

Day one brought announcements about new capabilities in Autodesk's 2009 releases. But all that later.

CEO Carl Bass spoke on trends on CAD. An interesting example, he says, is the bar for engineering and design has been raised by the gorgeous graphics of entertainment industries. Another trend has an increasingly global market ruthlessly commodizing just about everything. And speaking of the global economy, says Bass, about 40 trillion dollars will be spent in global infrastructure in the next few years. China alone is going to build 50 new airports in the next ten years.

How are projects of the scope as the recent replacement and rebuilding of the Bay Bridge managed?

The world's largest self-supporting suspension bridge, the Bay Bridge was kept open while this happened. Drive-through animations were created to show motorists detours. On Labor day 2007, the bridge was closed for three days to replace a huge section. Infrommercial on TV showed animations to motorists. A lot of free press was had because simulations were so compelling. Bay area freeways during that time were almost empty, proving that good communication can affect motorist behavior

Bridge simulations created about 10 years ago created a digital model of the bridge in 3D Studion Max to generate rendered images. The 3D model provides a repository of information.The software incorporates time into the 3D model to communicate complex construction techniques as defined by multiple project schedules. Three major contractors were building in a constricted space and 3D and 4D models let team members work out complex design issues.

More to come...

New surfacing mathematics

Leslie_Gordon — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:23:00 GMT

A few other things gleaned from SolidWorks 2008:

-- One conference theme was that of teaching kids engineering through robotics. Robotic contests mentioned included ROBOCON, FIRST, and ROBO Cup. Kids can use 3D ContentCentral, a free service on the SolidWorks Web site for locating, configuring, downloading, and requesting 3D parts and assemblies, 2D blocks, library features, and macros.

-- Tulane University has closed it Mechanical Engineering Department.

-- Check out Gliffy, a nifty drawing program that works on a hosted Web site.

SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray says it would be good to apply Creative Commons to product design. CC defines everything between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved.

Today, CAD is all about design intent, not just geometry. Scott Harris, co-founder of SolidWorks says there are now new surfacing mathematics that are better than NURBS. There is said to be a new kernel in the works for CATIA. Basically, a kernel is software code that solves topology.

A last view from my hotel window shows why Ione might be tempted to move to San Diego!

Rules to design by...

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:01:00 GMT

Day Four, Live from SolidWorks World 2008

Don Norman spoke today on how to tie engineering and emotional design. He showed us an images of salt and pepper shakers as an example of bad design. They were burnished stainless steel. One shaker had a hole in the top, and the other shaker had five holes in the top. Norman asked the audience, "Which one is the salt shaker and which the pepper?" Answers were about 50/50 for both. His point: Each side had its good reasons why it picked one over the other. But in the final analysis, it doesn't matter what you think, but rather what the person that filled the things thinks!

Which is for salt and which for pepper?

So his rules to design by are:

1. Think about people. Put people in the designs that are part of the model so you can analyze things such as reach, limits, canter of balance to see if people can actually use the objects you design.

2. Make it usable. Examples of bad design come from common machine tools in machine shops. People have to be contortionists just to run the machines.

3. No signs. A product that needs signs on it is badly designed. People don't read signs anyway.

4. Make it beautiful. Make even things like forklifts beautiful. In a lot of ways, when it comes to design, LOOKS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN REALITY.

View from my hotel room.....

Conduit "creatures" that walk the beach

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:06:00 GMT

Day Three, live from SolidWorks World 2008:

Announced today at the opening session of the SolidWorks 2008 show was a new program called 3Dvia Composer -- formerly Seemage -- that Dassault recently purchased. It is a Web-based product that works with SolidWorks to deliver 3D content for non-engineering personnel such as marketing and sales.

A few customers highlighted in today's presentation include medical companies such as Still River Systems Inc, which makes proton therapy systems (used instead of the more-intrusive X-ray systems). The systems use particle-beam accelerators to fire electron in a precise manner towards tumors. Another one is Taga Innovations in Israel which designed a device called the "Rewalk." Quadriplegics can strap one on and walk for the first time in their lives.

Danny Forster from the Discovery Channel's Big it Builder show spoke on how as an architect he designs in nothing but 3D. One recent project was the Glenville Stadium in Arizona which has a retractable football field. This makes it easier to grow fresh grass on the field, as well as allows it to be used for activities other than football. In the past, stadiums were designed as a structure with the design then wrapped around it like wallpaper. It was decided that this building should look like a snake coiled on itself because of its desert surroundings and because the snake is the Patriots logo. So, the stadium was engineered as a hyperbolic curve bent in on itself.

But of all the presentations, the one that truly blew my mind was one from a kind of mad genius named Theo Jansen. He engineers "creatures" that live on the beach -- what he called "new forms of life not made of protein." The creatures' protein is cable conduit, while their "muscles" are conduit that pumps air into a soda bottle for reuse. "Nerve cells" made from inverters trigger the muscles. Three inverters make a dynamic system or a computer that is the beginnings of the brains of the animal. The creatures get their energy from the wind and do not have to compete for food. Jansen's vision is that they will eventually live on herds on the beach.

Check out this video of the incredible creatures.

A creature taking a nap

Big trends in the future of CAD

Leslie_Gordon — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:23:00 GMT

Day Two: Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, says the show has so far drawn 4,400 attendees. In the future, he wants to see more sharing between DS technologies and SolidWorks. He says software developers cannot afford to "fall in love with their own technologies." Companies should never think that they own customers. Nobody does. Customers can pick whatever they want whenever they want. Ray also says Latin America is SolidWorks' fastest region of growth, even faster than China.

Also speaking was an electrical systems teacher at Long Beach Community College who has his pre-engineering students design submersible robots in SolidWorks and enter them in robotic competitions. He thinks that human-intensive manufacturing is rapidly disappearing, but we should not be all doom and gloom -- there are plenty of rich opportunities in automation. People are needed to design, build, and install robots, as well as maintain them, for example. He says a recent graduate who knows more than just one thing, say, mechanical, electrical, hydraulics, and pneumatics, have their pick of high-paying jobs.

Ex-CEO and one of the founders of SolidWorks, Jon Hirschtik gave an interesting look CAD's 50-year history. It all started in 1963 with Ivan Sutherland who wrote his M.I.T. thesis on "SketchPad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System." Back then, he even discussed the idea of doing structural analysis in CAD and applying constraints to models -- unheard of at the time. Hirschtik says the 1070's brought 3D modeling research at Cambridge University. Research in using B-reps as the basis of CAD was underway. And Alan Grayer and Charles Lang helped write the ACIS and Parasolid kernels. The name "ACIS" came from its developers' initials: Alan Charles Ivan System. The 1970's also brought some of the first commercial applications such as Computer Vision, Cadam, and Applicon, and a Unigraphics CAD-CAM system called "The Total Solution." By the 1980's, second-generation CAD was coming along with CATIA in 1981, AutoCAD in 1983, and Pro/Engineer in 1987. SolidWorks was developed in 1993, and since that time, there have been 16 major releases.

Hirschtik also discussed what he thinks are the big trends in the future of CAD:

Hosted computing -- Applications run on Web sites, not on PCs. Only the Web browser runs locally. This is already being done extensively in other areas (e-mail, online banking, and Google Docs).

Open source -- The source code is open for anyone to change. If they do change it, they must implement the changes in the original code. Current examples include Linux, Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Apache.

Video game technology -- Graphics quality, 3D user interfaces, and physical simulations are all things that CAD will exploit more and more in the future.

Touch Interfaces -- Already big with the iPhone, Wii, and 3-axis mouse.

3D printing -- Can only get bigger in the future.

Live from SolidWorks World 2008

Leslie_Gordon — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:19:00 GMT

Day 1:

Saturday Jan 19
This year's event is being held in San Diego, Calif., a city I have not visited before. I've heard many stories about its beauty, especially the colored neon lights lining the top edges of highrise buildings. An 11 pm taxi ride from the airport to the hotel showed off the cityscape at night, and the view is as neat and colorful as was described. I'm sure daylight will bring even more delights.

The next few days should be interesting. A bit unusually, the conference starts on a Sunday. Event materials say that keynote speakers will discuss topics ranging from "human-centered design" to "the design of submersible cameras." A Product Design Showcase will display more than 200 SolidWorks-designed products, with many of the designers on-site to explain the problems they solved in the course of their designs.

And, a SolidWorks Block Party is to be held one evening. It should be great: The company cordoned off part of the waterfront district for a private party for all event attendees. A flyer promises "unlimited food and drinks... live music...pool halls... nightclubs... and plenty of surprises..." Hmmmmmm!!