News from zCon

One of the newer and most recent trade shows around 3D design and development was the recent zCon show in Mountain View CA. The show provided a number of technical sessions, but more importantly the chance to allow collaboration and interaction among developers, designers, and hardware suppliers for 3D applications and systems. Hence the focus on “z”.

Although this is a smaller event, it did offer some excellent sessions as well as the “Birds of a Feather” lunches that allow individuals that have specific interests a chance to network and spend time together. Another benefit of the agenda was a focus on commercial versus research/academia sessions. Read full article »

An Update on Dassault’s CATIA

One of the CAD software products with a long and compelling history is Dassault Systems’ CATIA product. As one of the CAD products that have been driven by large scale design programs, typically undertaken by larger organizations, CATIA is a critical tool for corporate CAD professionals. Given its heritage and importance in the market, there have been a few very important and recent announcements around this product that are worth noting. Read full article »

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword – The New 3D Drawing Pen

One of the great things about the technology industry is that there are literally thousands of start-up companies that are conceiving and building very cool new products. One of these has just announced their contribution to this trend the 3D Pen, called the “3Doodler”. Basically, what you now have is a “pen” that lets you draw, with a plastic compound, a full three dimensional item.

It is worth noting that the level of precision that this pen provides is not that high, so the idea of actually drawing a gear or any other high precision item isn’t here yet. However, this brand new device opens up some really interesting new capabilities and will likely create some new CAD market dynamics. Read full article »

Outlook for 3D Printing

The impact of 3D printing on the CAD professional has been incredibly profound. The ability to actually create a physical manifestation of a design at very low cost, relatively quickly, and with strong quality is shortening the design cycle and giving designers a level of feedback that was never before possible. As we look into 2013, there are some very interesting trends starting to emerge. Read full article »

New CAD Display Technologies to Look Forward to

Visualization of designs and components is the key part of the CAD experience. And the importance of the display technologies that enable this can’t be understated. However, if we look back over the last 15-20 years, there has been precious little disruptive technological change in the displays used for CAD. Sure, we have low cost 3D, and larger screens with incredible resolution. Yet, if you look at the fundamentals, very little has changed.

There are now some very interesting new technologies on the horizon that may change this dynamic and dramatically improve the CAD Experience. There are two that I believe are worth focusing on. Read full article »