In the good old days, when designing a product meant drawing it with paper and pencil, then crafting a model out of wax or foam, product development was a lot slower. There was one big advantage, though - engineers, marketers, and clients could sit down together, pick up the model, play with it, talk about it.
Manufacturers such as Chrysler Motors routinely post models and drawings on an intranet, where they can be viewed and downloaded by everyone who needs to use them. But the holy grail of the industry remained what's known as the collaborative engineering environment - a multi-user program that would let people at remote computers to work on the same virtual model in real time.
"There's been a lot of lip service in that area, but the actual physical capability of turning models and looking at them concurrently and simultaneously has been slow to develop," says Stan Kolodziej, executive editor at Daratech, a CAD/manufacturing market-research firm.
Two new software applications may have solved this problem, though, as attendees at the AutoFact trade show in Detroit, Michigan, saw this week. The programs, dubbed VP/Collaborate and VisNetwork, are produced by Engineering Animation, Inc.
The new tools let people get their virtual hands dirty tinkering with the same digital machine over the Internet or intranet. Although several engineering applications offer similar functionality, the EAI products are the first to allow collaboration outside of complex CAD programs, running on high-end workstations, which means that workers without workstations can take part.
Although a few companies offer this as part of large applications, Kolodziej said, "Users have complained that it's slow, that it stalls. You can't get a real 3-D view, you can't bring in geometry or a multiscreen format, you can't focus on much detail. So this is a vertical application that really expands the toolset."
Nowadays, prototypes are usually drawn using a CAD program, and frequently tested as virtual prototypes, using a variety of animation and 3-D modeling programs.
VP/Collaborate uses a standard Web browser to let people at separate locations look at and operate the same digital model. Meanwhile, VisNetwork manages and integrates the visual data produced by separate computers and applications. So if four designers are working on four separate engine components - storing the data on their individual machines - the product manager could log on at any time and see the complete engine without waiting to download files.
"Within a large manufacturing organization like an auto company, there are relatively few creators of data, but there might be many people who are consumers of data, explained Bill Boswell, director of software products development at EAI. "Data is typically created in the engineering design group. In manufacturing, they use that data to build their tooling and create assembly sequences, which are typically distributed to the shop floor as drawings on paper. But we see it being distributed as a three-dimensional model or animation, via the intranet."
Using the program, an engineer at an automobile manufacturing company and a designer at another company creating a gear-shift housing for the auto can get online and call up a 3-D model of the car. The engineer can virtually remove a part from the model, turn it around, and change its diameter or location. The designer sees this activity in real time, and can also manipulate or change the part.
Kolodziej says he found the new EAI products "fast and very capable." A big plus, he said, is that they can use data from a wide variety of CAD systems and deliver that data to a wide range of computers, from desktop PCs to Windows NT to Unix workstations.
