Squeezin’ into that browser just isn’t as easy as it use to be. You’ve got 3D search capabilities busting out all over. It’s even spilling onto your desktop to make your media searching and organizing a multi-dimensional trip to Zoom-ville.
’3D searching’ – It’s here and it’s getting more intense. From web pages to images and all the media stored in the recesses of your hard-drive, we’ve got you covered. But on the 3D CAD and Design side… uhm, not so much.
Who’s bringing the 3D? A handful of companies. There’s similarities and differences, but it all wreaks of abolishing traditional search. Take a look. Can any of this be applied to 3D CAD or design?
What the Coolest?
Cooliris really stands out here. It’s web-based, it’s fast and it’s intuitive. Now wonder they just raised 15 million. That’s not stopping the others and even some not listed here to crank up the development of 3D-ish ways to find content.
What about CAD and Design?
It’s outlandish I say, someone needs to be severely questioned. 3D search is lacking in 3D CAD and design. I doubt it’s developers overtly putting aside the idea. It’s just not the most important piece of functionality needed. A perfect opportunity for third-party developers.
Only one company that I know of, ShapeSpace, with their PartBrowser product, is actively developing a 3D search tool to search your desktop for 3D ‘in 3D’. It’s an excellent product, but I can’t help but wish it has some of the slickness of Cooliris or a web-based component. But is that really needed?
Media Explorer, particularly the 3D variety are getting more and more popular, but not even the kings of online user-generated content, 3DVia and Google 3D Warehouse, has a way to search their 3D data repositories in 3D, or to even retrieve data inside those models in a visually stunning manner. Which makes me ask again, is it really needed?
Update: from Csven on Twitter – @solidsmack – “Carbon Goggles“. Not so much a search but an AR-simulating HUD which overlaid environmental impact info. – This is a really interesting look at how to find info in a 3D environment. Perhaps some of this could be applied to search.
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Great Post… and this inspires a Questions.
Does anybody know of a stand alone app. that could brows PDF files on a local network like these do?
We have close to 500 “control sheets” that are assembly drawings of various wellhead configurations. Our sales staff has to use a limited description to find the control sheet the are after. It would be nice to have them page through a “digital book” Each of the files are in their own sub folder…. but if I HAD TO i could create a copy of all the PDF files in one folder and do it in SolidWorks explorer… I just want a method that doesn't require me to create copies of the files.
Cheers,
Al
Yeah, would be nice huh. A lot of potential for search it seems. A lot of potential for it to be done really badly too. On your point, I've seen where a single PDF is created with a ToC – each page is added or linked to from the single PDF. Also works well for creating a catalog online.
You may look into the portfolio functionality. You can create a PDF portfolio of different media. Sales loves this kind of stuff. Puts all the info in one spot.
Yeah, the portfolio idea works… but we are creating new assemblies every day.
3D CAD Search is alive and well. If you're interested in 3D search for design you should really check out Geolus Search from Siemens.
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/pro...
Geolus Search software is a geometry-based search engine for both single- and multi-CAD environments Geolus help to reduce/control part costs throughout the product lifecycle, manage engineering design knowledge and increase manufacturing efficiencies.
Geolus Search provides automated part search results based on geometric similarity.
Jerry Sarfati
Hi Jerry, thanks. Geolus sounds much like Partbrowser. Is there a site with demo's or development news? It would be interesting to compare the two.
Thanks again!
Hey Josh – thanks for the mention!
I think you've got 2 kinds of '3D search' here. There's '3D search' where 3D shape is used as a means of finding a part/CAD model. And there's '3D search' where a 3D interface is used to visualize the results of a web or image search (or 3D models in PartBrowser).
I think using 3D to visualize results has pros and cons.
Pros:
a. It can be a very natural way to allocate lots of pixels to the most important result and fewer to less important ones. Put the most important at the 'front' and others further back. Cooliris does this really nicely (although I can't help thinking there are a lot of wasted grey pixels as you slide along the wall).
b. It also allows you to navigate and have a sense of where you're positioned in the 'space' of results – again Cooliris does this really well.
Cons:
a. I think there's a real danger of building 'eye-candy' and an over-complicated UI without adding any real benefits. You see lots of 3D interfaces where results are stacked in 3D but you can only actually see a couple and lots of pixels are wasted on unnecessary borders etc. (SW Explorer?!).
b. I also think 3D is always somewhat more difficult to interact with than a 2D page.
For PartBrowser we decided that as the results of searches were 3D models you really should be able to see them in 3D. We thought 2D thumbnails wouldn't cut it – 'a 3D model is worth a 1000 images'. We also wanted to be able to show lots of results so that the user could 'browse' the results. We could either have lots of small models or we needed some way of giving more pixels to some results and fewer to others and have a convenient way of navigating amongst them. We thought a 3D browser was the natural way to do this.
I think doing full 3D in a web browser is hard without having to download add-ins at the moment. Hence why Google 3D Warehouse and the like don't have snazzy interfaces and why we don't yet have a web interface for PartBrowser. This may not be true for too much longer.
Now to the value of 3D shape search. We've found being able to measure the shape similarity of 3D models opens up lot's of possibilities. Foremost of these is the 3D shape search we have in PartBrowser, where you can now find parts/models when you don't know what it was called, where it was saved or what it's part number was – helping to avoid 'reinventing the wheel' and all the costs that entails. However, we are also currently working on a project where we use shape similarity in the background to indentify and 'link' together similar parts from a large library. We can then 'data-mine' this to recognise duplicates and groups of parts which could be rationalized and other such helpful things.
The value of these things varies from company to company and user to user, but in some circumstances the savings can be large.
Cheers, and sorry for rambling!
Andy
ps if anyone would like to invest $15m into us we could get PartBrowser _much_ slicker visually!
Josh,
Some advantages of Geolus Search are: Geolus Search is architected as a web service, works with distributed databases, and our customers have hundreds of thousands of parts that they search every day.
For more info, check out the main product page at: http://bit.ly/3rhckv it has the brochure and demo videos.
If you're interested in more, let me know (I can try to put together a blog post with some new demos. )
Jerry
I'd absolutely love to see some demos. Let me know when they're up! thanks!
Thanks Andy. Man, a lot of what you're talking about are things I started thinking about as I used the different 3D browsing programs. There are indeed two very different aspects of '3D searching' – geometry search and compare is DEFINITELY more important from a 3D CAD/Design/Manufacturing perspective. Who cares about the eye candy right?
But in the same vein, I think UI can go a long way toward visually expalining what the user is looking for, just as you have pointed out. The pixel-wasting needs to go for sure, but I think results can be explained in a way that is very intuitive for 3D and web types.
I keep coming up against simplicity in UI the more videos of “1 year olds using an iPhone” I see.
Sounds like you guys are on top of things and have some interesting functionality in the works. Now to see about that 15 mil.
Thanks again for the thoughts Andrew!
We had an early version of PartBrowser where you could use standard Doom keys to fly through the parts – it tended to make people feel nauseous….
Cool though!
Nice review.
i like Cooliris
Drew Sherlock is correct – when I saw your title, I also thought that it was the “draw an outline and the program finds it” type of app.
I'm surprised that no-one has yet mentioned the obvious about the other type of “3D search”, the one discussed in this article. Each and every one of the examples shown is just the latest PC world rip-off of a GUI concept that Apple put considerable time and efforts into getting right; namely CoverFlow and its cousin in the AppleTv interface.
It speaks volumes about Microsoft being all about the PR and sales marketing, with an utter lack of innovation in the company itself, as reflected in their whole business being based around just copying their competitors.
XYZ, you're SO RIGHT. (This is really where this topic diverges and it makes me want to rewrite the post from the two perspectives of what ''3D search” means and Drew pointed out and increasingly becomes evident.)
The coverflow concept from apple… each one of those apps are emulating it to the T. It makes sense with the intuitive nature of the UI, especially if interfaces start going all touchy.
working this into 3D part geometry search? I think there's possibilities to do some really innovative things. 1) Because we know what we're looking for (not just browsing) 2) because we're familiar with 3D and know how we want to move or review geometry in that environment.
Even though these examples are all fancy UI apps, they can definitely inspire new ways of finding, comparing part geometry, reducing part creation, and improving search.
Have you tried Goog Desktop Indexing tools?
Check here:
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/search/?query...
Here's a geometry based, modeler independent 3D Search Product called '3DSearchIT' from Geometric Ltd : http://3dsearchit.geometricglobal.com/Benefits/...
Very nice, good work !
http://www.iseekcorp.com
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