3D Collaboration in WPF

by Don Burnett

Have you ever had to work on a project with companies many miles from you or possibly not in the same hemisphere? Well remote collaboration leads to some extremely challenging situations. During every part of a project you may need to view progress, do sign-offs, update things quickly. The Internet makes that easy but if you are an architect, and engineer, or even an interior designer. Have you ever wanted better control and more discrete reviews or a design project?

Enter InterKnowlogy with 3D Collaborator..

If you are working on a team project you might need to annotate parts or portions, make changes, and do team reviews of work. The folks at InterKnowlogy understood this problem and when they saw WPF knew that it was perfect for a real time 3D collaboration tool. One that understand 2D and 3D AutoCAD files and would let you examine each detail of a drawing and make comments link to each individual piece, with information.. The tool allows for approvals and quick review with both 2D and 3D models.

As you can see above you get to see the Drawing sheet with Exterior Perspectives. The drawing is in real time so the speed is instantaneous. You can also dive into the structure panel to isolate individual parts of the image. Each gets a properties panel where you can make notes, link to URLs, create identification parts.

Here is another example this time in real time 3D the rendered file can be moved around with perspective and individual elements of the drawing can be selected and annotated. This is a very quality product. The annotation capabilities are quite flexible, and this application allows you to annotate on the surface of those AutoCAD© DWF drawings. The annotations are persisted in a file system, a SQL server Database or SharePoint 2007. With it's annotation capability it allows the user to attach annotations in the form of documents, SharePoint discussions or URLs to the exact selected spot on the AutoCAD© DWF drawing. In the SharePoint 2007 version, the application leverages the collaborative environment and provides data in the context of the project not in the context of its storage. It is a feature rich application that allows users to drag and drop data into the context of the project. The WPF application then handles the display annotations of the underlying storage.

This is a great example of a Rich Client application that does some great things for approvals and can be used in about every step of a design project.

They have a demo available for download as well.. It's a one-click install.. This is a great application and if you are a 3D designer you need to check out this application, it can help you through both your design, engineering, and approval processes. It's a Rich Client Application in real time 2D and 3D. You won't find this kind of 3D integration on other so-called "R-I-A" platforms at the moment at least..

Technorati tags: Autocad, Autodesk, Interknowlogy, 3D collaborator, WPF