Solution

What's the business problem which needs to be solved?

There are a couple of business problems in the 3D Design processes of product development:

  1. The traditional 2D/3D CAD vendors have created > 130 different and incompatible file formats
    • there is no common denominator like Collada for DCC
    • These differences and incompatibilities results in inefficient collaboration for 3D Designing
  2. These CAD vendors don't support 3D Co-design processes which crosses organisational borders
    • they, without any exception, didn't apply open & promising Web standards like WebGL and HTML5
    • some of them have been invested in Flash, however Flash turned out not being future proof, compared to HTML5
  3. The current practise of sharing 3D Model source files is insecure regarding IP and will not generally be used
    • this leads to collaboration in 2D, on paper, screen shots, pdfs, etc.
    • thes files are not more than deviated files of the primary 3D Design workflow, so
    • this will result in a release & change management challenge, because this practise doesn't scale well with an increasing number of stakeholders and a high iteration rate
  4. The net results of this all is a relatively high  number of physical model defects in the engineering & prototpype phase
    • this number is unneccesary high due to suboptimal use of an integrated 3D model during the whole product development process end2end

Starting in 2007, extensive market research and surveys at more than 100 product designers & market specialists, showed there is not yet any solution out there for the SME market. End 2012 this was still valid.

ICR3ATE took up the challenge to specify, design, develop and release a solution for this all. This challenge took almost 5 years of consulting, thinking, developing and waiting on the maturity of WebGL and HTML5. Early 2013 there are similair intitiatives thanks to the increased maturity of these Web technologies. However we are still quite unique in the 3D Designers tools & services marketplace. This unique position will be kept in the coming years, because we use high end technology but will focus on the 3D Designers and the design process, i.s.o. products and file formats, like most of our competitors do.

Illustration of our solution for 3D designers in SME