0:16 Okay. Hey everyone. I’d like to start with a a show of hands. Who’s ever Who’s ever used one of these devices? Yeah? And keep your hand up if you used the device in the past 3 months. And keep your hand up if you use it for work. Yeah, that’s about that’s about normal. So, hey, I’m Jay, co-founder and CEO here at Gravity Sketch. And Gravity Sketch is a 3D design tool.

0:41 It allows multiple people to be specially located and iterate, collaborate in 3D. And as you can see, multiple personas. Everyone’s wearing the devices, but you can also jump in from your laptop or web browser. And we’re seeing lots of different use cases from people ideating to wayfinding for grocery store, for example. But the whole goal here is to solve spatial problems together. So, multiple parties getting together trying to figure out is this going to work in the real world?

1:10 And what we’ve set out to achieve as a company is help people bring better products to market. And we’re doing this through providing a spatial platform where people can get together and solve those really complicated 3D problems. So, just in the past year, here are some products that have launched through the help of Gravity Sketch. And I’m particularly interested in this one here. It’s been quite interesting to see the concept artist trying to plan out how how these big blue aliens are going to move through a scene.

1:40 But more more frequently, we see a lot of transportation, footwear, and and bits and pieces of architecture come through the platform. And the the problem that we set out to initially solve was this back-and-forth process of moving from 2D into the 3D and properly getting at scale and being able to understand the ramifications of what happens if you bring this product to market. And so, I want to pause here for a little bit just to talk about 2D and 3D and many will assume that the image on the left here is 2D and the one on the right here is 3D, but I argue that both of these are two dimensions.

2:14 Even if this is a CAD model that you can rotate, you’re still lacking the the stereoscopic view. So, your brain is actually doing this activity when it’s trying to understand 3D or yeah, 3D through a 2D medium. So, you’re kind of consistently looking at each frame or multiple frames per second, but your your brain’s trying to piece this together. And so, ultimately, we still build to understand.

2:37 We have to make models so we can better understand how this model’s going to perform in the real world and this becomes the bottleneck. So, once you get to a physical prototype, everyone can actually align together and really try to figure out what the problem is, but getting to a physical prototype takes long time. And so, here’s where spatial computing comes in or virtual reality. It’s a bit of a an elephant in the room, I would say, cuz many people haven’t been using it and aren’t seeing the the purpose of using it every single day.

3:06 And in fact, this has been around for a very long time. So, we entered the journey right around here with the DK2. And so, we’ve been on this long journey and the thing that I would say keeps our team highly motivated and engaged is not just our customers, but also we have four of the mag seven here investing in this space. So, whether or not it’s going to be the next computing platform or not, there’s deep investment happening here and there is still value to be driven out of here even if we’re not using it on daily basis.

3:32 And I feel part of the reason why we’re not using it on a daily basis is because this is the this is the thing that sold to us, a complete and total replacement of our existing technology, which I think is a huge fallacy. VR is not a new platform, I would say. It’s at least in its current form form, it’s more of a a capability and we can leverage that capability in unique places in the workflow.

3:53 And so, our vision really is about those moments where you need alignment. Spatial alignment’s really critical, and everyone here in the room probably understands or has a good understanding of 3D, but what happens when you bring someone from brand side? What happens when you bring someone in from human factors who maybe doesn’t have the same vocabulary, although they still understand 3D in their own in their own right?

4:13 And so, when we started diving deeper into the workflow, a lot of our customers were actually exploding this area here, and it’s not weeks of feedback because they’re not just trying to get to this this model. They’re actually trying to understand multiple layers of the development process. So, brand identity, of course, is at the top layer, but then you have human factors, you have manufacturability, you have assembly.

4:35 And this is where we start to tease out some really interesting workflows and personas that we didn’t initially assume would come to the platform. So, clay modelers are actually using our product in line with the usage of Alias. So, they’re actually taking Alias data, putting it into a virtual environment, mapping that on top of clay, and then using our tools to edit, and then sending the edited geometry straight to the mill.

4:57 So, they’re milling straight out of our platform. This is really interesting cuz we we’re seeing a lot of people bringing in data that they didn’t normally work with. So, this is a designer that’s getting data from the factory in Vietnam, importing that Rhino data, and then doing like minor adjustments and tweaks. So, it’s this kind of loop feedback between the the tech technical 3D modeler and the toolmaker and and the designer.

5:21 And then more interestingly, we’re starting to see people use it for not what you would assume to be the classic aesthetic design, but actually trying to figure out these blind spots for the driver. So, building a physical mule, sitting inside the physical mule, and then being able to articulate and understand where they might need to put cameras or mirrors and so forth. So, this is a really interesting use case that we’re seeing.

5:42 And again, this is using VR as a feature, not necessarily using it as the replacement for all of their their computing stock. Again, ergonomics, so getting in and out of these vehicles is also a thing, especially with different human heights and sizes. And so, planning for this it takes laborious amounts of time and being able to do this in a digital space is is really empowering these teams.

6:04 But this is the workflow I want to talk a little bit about today. This is one that came across our desk not too long ago. And when I first saw it I was like, this is kind of weird, what what’s happening here? But what turns out is that these designers were actually working with the electrical engineering team, and they’re planning out the routing, cable routing, for vehicles.

6:23 And this is a really big problem, and it’s very human-led because assembly, service, and and manufacturing all play a role in this. And so, with a motorcycle it’s pretty apparent because it’s all kind of exposed, but when you start getting into heavy machinery, a lot of it is tucked away. And so, I started to dive into the the whole cable harnessing and routing, and this is Siemens NX, this is what it looks like normally.

6:46 And you’re spending weeks, if not months, trying to plan out every one of these linkages and how they blend into each other and how they respect the movement of the vehicle, but also the design parameters that the team put forward. And this is what a car looks like when it’s fully wired up and in in the in the CAD system, and we’re not even taking into account the HVAC system and so forth.

7:09 So, there’s there’s more more stuff to get jammed into here. And so, I started to go into the rabbit hole and seeing that harnessing all around us, and this is such an interesting use case. I just wanted to get more and more out of this use case. So, this is a airplane, this is inside the airplane, so you can see there’s just like tons of of planning and and wiring that needs to take place.

7:28 This is your washing machine, so bits and pieces in your washing machine, of course. And here is your coffee maker. So, it is really around us everywhere. Like, cable harnessing is a big big big workflow challenge for our customers. And there’s three components that comprise from the the the issues here, and one is understanding collision points. This is really important when assembling and servicing, optimizing material links.

7:54 So, you can imagine a vehicle if you’re a couple centimeters long that the cost can be going up as well. If you’re a couple centimeters short, you can’t assemble. And then planning for assembly, this is really interesting. So, they actually lay out every This is a This is like the assembly that will then go into a component of the car. So, they lay it all out, they test everything.

8:12 Then they go to the assembly line, then humans actually have to implement it. So, doing a lot of this stuff in the virtual environment has helped teams plan, but also be a lot more creative. Cuz normally they would probably work on like last year’s architecture and just move it forward and maybe make a couple of minor adjustments. But they’re able able to get more creative. This is a a platform of a a EV vehicle.

8:36 And just planning with This is I’ve just done a a really simple example of how some of our customers work, but trying to plan how the cabling might go to a certain component from the battery pack. And then they can start looking at how they might harness and tie that cable down. And so, to build a solution like this, something that people may forget is that this is just a smartphone.

8:57 In fact, it’s probably like a couple year old generation of a of a Samsung device. So, the computing power is not like extreme like our our desktop PCs. And so, from our side we have to decimate data. We have to make sure the data can get to the device. A lot of our customers don’t want to plug the device to their machines. So, we built a whole cloud system so you can upload your data, decimate the data, and then the data’s readily available on the device.

9:22 And so, through doing that we started to see these use cases organically come about because these design teams and engineering teams are working in close proximity of one another. And so, now you can import pretty heavy data and you can do a lot of planning not just from the design side and the ergonomic side but more and more from the electrical and system side which has been really exciting to see.

9:46 And so all of this data can be manipulated and edited and you can take that data directly into your NX platform. So this is not a matter of like oh now I’m going to replace the work that I was doing in NX but actually I can get more creative, I can understand it from a human level spatially at one to one scale and then I can bring all that nerves data into the platform of choice and continue to progress it downstream.

10:08 So the workflow that our customers are now starting to explore and a couple of our customers have fully implemented is doing a lot of the early stages spatially where the risk is low, they don’t have to build anything physical, there’s not weeks of rework, they’re just jumping in, they’re planning things out. They’re actually bringing in the nerves data as well from like last last generation’s model and tweaking that nerves data.

10:29 I wish I could show some of that work. Unfortunately I can’t. And then they’re just bringing it into the NX platform and proceeding it. And what we’re seeing is that a lot of this stuff is accelerating the final stage where there’s a lot less back and forth because they’re getting a lot of that early stage planning out of the way. And I want to talk a little bit about like how these workflows start to land on our doorstep because we’re not thinking about them at all, we’re just finding these in our customer segments.

10:57 And so your normal software is kind of this linear process. You’re kind of going through each step of the way to to get to your your goal and this is probably where AI is really going to accelerate because it’s really defined each step you need to go through. However, when you’re dealing with creativity, engineering, design, you actually spend a lot of time in this unknown space and so it’s really important to get started and have like a very structured way of getting in and getting out.

11:22 So the ingress and egress to the solution is really critical but finding a space where people can actually fully explore and get creative is really important. So we tried to structure our software in this way. It’s very rigid to get in and get out, but once you’re in the experience, we let you be a human in that space. And a lot of this stems from some of the work that we were doing early on before we decided to go full speed in a company like this and build a company like this.

11:50 Where we started to look at other people in the space that were researching around, you know, our multiple intelligence. And we found that it’s quite challenging for, especially creative individuals, to navigate a lot of these cat tools because they’re mainly driven through like linguistics and mathematics. And actually these are like super strong spatial visualizers. And same with engineers, right? Anyone that builds physical products can understand things at scale.

12:13 So, once you get 3D on the table, that’s the source of truth. And so, we want to really centralize our experience around spatial. So, how do you navigate and move through your space as a human being as if you had a physical product right in front of you. One of the challenges that we had with this was these controllers, gaming controllers. Not a lot of people are familiar with these.

12:32 They have very limited inputs compared to a keyboard. And so, again, it just hearkens back to our approach of treating this as a feature and not as a replacement. So, how do we leverage these the same way that we would leverage our hands? And of course, you can use your hands today as well in these tools, but even in the real world we’re using peripherals to extend the human potential.

12:53 So, navigating everything with fingers just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But we looked at the real world and tried to mimic the real world. So, our product principles were really centered around everything you do has to be immediate because you have this thing strapped to your face limiting the sense that we depend on most, our vision. So, we’re trying to just spend as little time as possible in a device like this.

13:17 Making things physical cuz we now have the the full use of our whole body. So, how do we use this as a a key input method? And then it’s really simple sets of rules. So, being able to get as quickly into the creative process as possible. We’ve also tried to structure the solution in this way as well where at the highest level you’re getting something. It may not be exactly, you know, what needs to go into the the downstream product, but you’re actually having an experience that is worthwhile.

13:44 And as you go down you’re unlocking more of the of the feature set. And so, some softwares will have everything right in front of you right from the get-go. We try to limit that and I think it’s really important if you’re going to build for the space to having like that first experience somewhat of a value and then let the user kind of navigate and find their way deeper into the solution.

14:02 And as I wrap up I’ll just show it This is an image of one of our designer’s desks. And we try to design with physicality in mind. And so, we were looking at different ways of measuring and I you know, they just go out and start prototyping with the physical world because that’s going to best support this digital space when we bring something into the to the spatial environment.

14:22 And so, it’s a lot different than designing for the screen because you have like a defined amount of pixels, you have a flat plane, and you have a lot of references. In the spatial world we don’t have a ton of references. We can’t reference a Katia or SolidWorks and say we’re just going to do what they do. If if you do that I think you’re going to end up like what we seen earlier where you just have a bunch of panels in space.

14:44 We really have to look at the physical world. Sometimes we spend time in woodshops or in a manufacturing floor and we just try to understand how people are using their body to to manufacture or to bring bring communicate with one another. And so, I’ll leave with this and just again my my takeaway here of course is like really awesome use cases in in the harnessing. But, I really want people to take away the idea that this is a feature.

15:09 It’s not the replacement of your technology like your your laptop and so forth. And if you look at Picasso here like he didn’t when he discovered this use of this technology, just a light with a battery and long exposure camera. He didn’t replace all of his tools in his workshop. He just used it as a feature to express himself in another dimension. And the tool that we first invented, or not invented, but first developed in our product was the spline tool.

15:32 And now that’s the tool that I find I’m getting the most excitement from and some of our customers are getting the most mileage out of. It’s not the sub-d surfacing, it’s not the analysis tools, it’s literally a simple stroke in space and being co-located with your colleagues, being able to express yourself spatially. So, I thank you and I have the product here. So, if anyone wants to give it a try later, I’ll be roaming around.

Appreciate it. To learn more about the CDFAM Computational Design Symposium, access the archive of previous presentations, interviews with speakers, and information about future events around the world, visit CDFAM.com.