Significant announcements for AR/VR for the CAD / AEC Industries

Why CAD should care about AR/VR?

VR (Virtual Reality) is all niche headsets and gaming? Or putting bunny ears on selfies… VR basically has a marketing problem. Looks cool but for many in enterprise it seems a niche technology to preview architectural buildings etc. In fact, the use cases are far wider if you get passed those big boxy headsets. AR (Augmented Reality) is essentially bits of VR on top of something see-through. There’s a nice overview video of the Microsoft Hololens from Leila Martine at Microsoft, including some good industrial case studies (towards the end of the video), here. Sublime have some really insightful examples too, such as a Crossrail project using AR for digital twin maintenance.

This week there have been some _really_ very significant announcements from two “gaming” engines, Unity and the Unreal Engine (UE) from Epic. The gaming engines themselves take data about models (which could be CAD/AEC models) together with lighting and material information and put it all together in a “game” which you can explore – or thinking of it another way they make a VR experience. Traditionally these technologies have been focused on gaming and film/media (VFX) industries. Whilst these games can be run with a VR headset, like true games they can be used on a big screen for collaborative views.

Could Deep Learning find the needle in the PDM/PLM haystacks or cloud?

Yowza at D3Live 2016!

Recently I attended the NVIDIA GTC Developers’ conference and spent a little time learning more about the deep learning products. A branch of machine learning that often aims to make better representations and create models to learn these representations from large-scale unlabeled data. Many of the use cases have been associated with text and image search, facial recognition or medical diagnosis (identifying specific cancers, medical problems).

How is CAD different to gaming apps? Apples and Pears!

I’ve recently written a couple of blogs on why professional graphics cards offer enterprise users value. Evan Yares (yes – the famous one) commented on my post and asked me this question. Evan I suspect already knows the answer as he was the first CAD analyst I saw write about the GPU virtualization projects associated with the GRID products I work on (back in 2013). “No More CAD Workstations”. The fact Evan jumped on it on the day of release makes me think he sees value in professional graphics development 😀

The value for enterprise in professional graphics above consumer gaming cards (GPUs)

I recently wrote a blog in response to a CAD blog highlighting the value in professional graphics cards over consumer gaming cards. In particular I tried to communicate how the software and drivers associated with these cards are a mainstay of the product you get; along with the investment in ensuring they are optimized, tested, certified for demanding applications such as Catia, Solidworks, etc. I felt I should have included more details of what you get with a professional graphics card such as our NVIDIA Quadro or GRID products. There is an awful lot of testing, development and support to staff with these products but I feel that is actually reflected in the end product.

D3DLive! My favourite CAD event and how to get a ticket for FREE! Now with added NVIDIA magic!

D3DLive! At Warwick University, UK on March 31^st 2016, yet again looks to be pure AWESOMENESS! Every year I blog about why nobody can afford to miss this event and just how amazing it is to attend! Don’t just take it from me – you can read reviews from a number of attendees last year – here.

• Tickets to attend are FREE, but you must be registered to attend and be warned they sell-out FAST: visit DEVELOP3D LIVE here to get your ticket

Why CAD users really care about hidden-line and what you need to know about it to test remote graphics!

In a past life I was a kernel engineer on Parasolid the numerical heart within many top CAD applications such Ansys Workbench, Dassault Solidworks, Siemens NX and Solid Edge, Bentley, Nemetscheck, Missler Top Solid; I lived, breathed and obsessed about CAD workflows, how users construct parts and use CAD applications. Now I’m in Cloud computing and VDI, I still get to work with CAD applications but am working in an industry where for many other than the customer – a CAD application is just another VDI or virtualised app or workload.

HDX: Enhanced Support for 3D and CAD Cursors with Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3

Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3 has introduced enhanced architecture to support both 24-bit and 32-bit advanced cursors. Historically remoting protocols have supported simpler cursors but with an increase in the use of complex and larger cursors for complex CAD and 3D applications, Citrix has introduced a new architecture to support such cursors on-going.

HDX 3D Pro – Toggling between lossy and lossless protocols to sharp CAD lines just got easier!

I’ve blogged before about how H.264 technologies can inherently have artefacts associated with them (read here). Particularly CAD hidden-line/wireframe lines that are near parallel can show a fading in colour or seem “less sharp”

HDX and H.264 Artefacts in Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp

Desktops are made of pixels

Images and desktops that make your screen consist of pixels. Your desktop in the datacenter or on your physical PC can be represented as a bitmap, where all the pixels are represented by 4 values: