The morning keynote was entertaining, but disappointing in the lack of detail. Dassault Systemes ceo Bernard Charles came out to describe his company's plans for the next decade. After reviewing the advances of the last several decades, he announced that DS would have "more 3D" over the next ten years. Considering the company has already talked up 4D (CAD+time), 3D was a bit of a let down.
He proudly showed off the 3D model of a car transmitted to his iPhone. The editor next to me pulled out her iPhone, and brought up a 3D model made in Inventor. As he twirled the model on his iPhone, she twirled hers. But Mr Charles did outdo her: he superimposed the car model onto a photograph of people standing on the stage.
SolidWorks ceo Jeff Ray showed off new technology his company has been working on for the last three years. "I could have shown it to you earlier, but I didn't want to until it was ready." What we got was a version of SolidWorks running on "the cloud," ie, a datacenter, piping graphics to a variety of computers on the stage.
Although the accompanying slide showed logos from Windows, Apple, Firefox, Linux, and Chrome (not sure if the logo belonged to Chrome the OS or Chrome the Web browser), we were shown SolidWorks running on a touch tablet (running Windows?), a Macintosh desktop, and an HP netbook (also running Windows). The other three logos went unrepresented.
Later, Deelip Menezes asked if that was SolidWorks running on the Mac: No, it was running on the cloud. Well, at least they had a Mac on the stage showing 3D CAD (unlike Autodesk).
The hightlight was James McLurkin, who showed off a dozen small robots operating in swarm mode. Via remote control, he gave one robot an instruction, and the others followed to suit, passing communications between them. Mr McLurkin is a great talker and a bit of a media star, having appeared in a two-page photograph in Time magazine.
Later, during the press conference with him, though, we were a bit puzzled. He could not give us any commerical applications for the technology, other than "the military, because they have lots of money" and a few other fields -- but no practical applications.
The biggest drawback, he noted, was communications, which is serial. A message passes from robot to robot, and if the robots travel faster than the message speed, they end up spinning in circles. This puzzled me, for I would have thought this problem could be solved through dendritic or parallel communications. How about a method of subgrouping, where a small group of robots follow one set of instructions together, and then arriving at a midpoint destination, become independent of the group.
The biggest impact at this show is Solido and its sub-$3000 3D printer. The company uses a different technology to drive down the price: a long roll of thin plastic sheeting is fed into the printer, and then a XY plotter (like a flatbed plotter) works with three "pens": one pen lays down glue, onto which the next sheet of plastic sticks. A second pen lays down anti-glue, where the sheets do not stick, and the third pen is a tiny knife that cuts the boundary between glued and unglued areas.
Like other 3D printers, layer upon layer of plastic is slowly built up at a painfully slow speed. A typical small model takes 4.5 hours. When you peel away the unglued areas, you reveal the 3D model. This is much better than any other 3D printer, which might requires hours of curing or dangerous chemicals to free the model. Drawbacks to this method is that you cannot create working parts (like a cresent wrench) or a ball within a ball.
The other drawback is the price. You're not going to be paying "under $3000", which Solido admits is a loss-leader. No, the actual price is around $14,000, which includes lots of plastic rolls, glue, anti-glue, knives, and software. They've hired a former executive of Packard-Bell to get this product into the bedrooms of children. Really. No kidding. That's what they think. "Every child in the world," no less.
The claim was contradicted by projected sales figures that showed that in maybe five years they might be able to outfit the bedrooms of all children in a rather small town. A rather rich small town.
Nevertheless, 3D printing is a wonderful concept, and I just hope it is not doomed to languish like speech input.
SolidWorks was pleased that this year's attendence of "over 5,000" was an increase over last years "nearly 4,500". They did not suffer the 40% drop experienced by Autodesk Universtiy, but then SolidWorks does not have a parallel virtual event to encourage the folks to stay home.
In the evening, SolidWorks had their regular press dinner, but this year it was massively scaled back. No sit-down dinner, no special speaker, no lavish gifts. That's ok. We worldwide media types enjoyed each other's company for an hour or so, catching up with each other's lives, renewing acquaintences, and relaying gossip. There is the news that a CTO is quitting soon, but I cannot give the name. One editor told us he grew up in the neighbourhood where the Dahli Lama lived for several years, but never caught on to who this strangely-dressed man was -- until he moved to California. Agreeing on which pr people we like, and which ones we wish would work in a different industry. Another editor described her frustration in telling her husband to buy and iPhone, and him coming home with every model but. And I got to relate horror stories of the upcoming winter olympics near my home town.
During the official events, I'm meeting with vendors, and will write them up in next Monday's upFront.eZine. (I'd post photos but I left my netbook's power supply at home, and I'm using borrowed computers to post this.)
Is there any reason you haven't covered new functionality being shown for Direct Modeling in SolidWorks?
Rumor is this functionality works because of the use of the CATIA V6 kernel.
Posted by: Jon Banquer | Feb 02, 2010 at 09:42 AM