As the volume of 3D content increases due to AI, geopolitics, and compressed product timelines that limit work travel, the ability to accurately assess 3D content has risen sharply
Design leaders also face the challenge of reducing costs as rising energy prices erode business profits, mounting pressure to eliminate expensive line items such as physical prototypes.
Gravity Sketch, an immersive 3D workspace, has released new AR updates to help customers accurately assess 3D content at scale and in context, and enhance AR collaboration.
These updates have been enabled by recent hardware advancements, such as built-in depth cameras on headsets, which have eliminated previous issues with environmental meshing and positional tracking.
With the new updates, spatial alignments can be created, edited, and saved. Users can accurately lock a virtual room and its contents, including 3D models, wireframes, and sketches, to the real world. These alignments are then available to anyone else in the same virtual room and physical place, from the environments panel in VR. Users can lock 3D data onto real-world content for ideation, in situ model review, and a better understanding of scale and design constraints.
By improving alignment between virtual and physical design, Gravity Sketch’s updates enable design leaders to reduce the number of physical prototypes needed, without increasing errors or compromising on quality.
The rise of AR
According to a report from AutoDesk, 98% of design and manufacturing leaders are using AI tools, including AI-generated 3D designs. This rise in 3D content is increasing the importance of AR in the product design process as it is the only technology that allows teams to experience 3D designs at true scale, with real-world context and genuine depth perception.
Oluwaseyi Sosanya, co-founder and CEO, Gravity Sketch, said, “It is very hard to read scale and proportion on a flat screen, even in CAD, so people add humans to images and still rely on individual spatial reasoning, which varies from person to person. Seeing designs in 3D with true depth perception makes it much easier to judge things like ceiling height, vehicle interiors, how a hand wraps around a tool, or how a worker’s body moves when reaching into a crate – leading to better ergonomic, layout, and productivity decisions before anything physical is built.
“AI and hardware developments have already made access and creation of 3D content easy. The real question now is how product teams consume it and make decisions.”
A focus on costs
Manufacturers worldwide across different sectors are also facing rising operating costs and supply chain instability. A survey conducted by the National Association of Manufacturers found that the top concern for 78% of manufacturers was trade uncertainty, and that most predicted input costs would rise by more than 5% over the next year. Energy costs and supply chain disruptions resulting from the war in Iran have also raised the stakes.
This is putting emphasis on physical prototypes, which are design leaders’ highest-ticket items and often rely on imported materials. AR provides teams with the ability to accurately assess designs and compare adjustments and iterations before moving to a physical prototype, reducing the number needed.
Oluwaseyi said, “A lot of the design leaders we work with are under pressure to cut costs, and they’re looking hard at the number of physical prototypes they can really justify. When one clay model in an automotive studio can cost around a quarter of a million dollars, and teams are making six or seven for a flagship vehicle, that’s a huge amount of time and money.
“With AR, a team can stand around a single physical model and explore multiple digital variations before they ever cut into the clay. Instead of building a new model every time a team wants to try a different surface or proportion, they can overlay those options in AR and decide which ones are worth committing to.”
Future-proofing product design
The future of product design is increasingly virtual, but for this transition to succeed, the connection between virtual and physical design needs to be reinforced. AR enables teams to virtually review products more comprehensively, as they can see the same 3D concept at true scale, experiencing its proportions, ergonomics, and spatial impact as if they were standing around the object.
Oluwaseyi said, “The new upgrades we’ve made make it possible to create, edit and save spatial alignments and lock them in a virtual room. This means all the virtual room’s content stays exactly where it should be, and you can get a proper sense of occlusion and depth. You can also add real-world reference objects.
“Teams in Detroit can be looking at the same full-scale virtual prototype as a team in Tokyo. Instead of flying people in for every review, or building a new prototype for every option, teams can do far more iterations virtually. You can even walk away and come back to it and the digital object will still be correctly aligned. This reduces costs, saves time and mitigates the risks of virtual reviews and costly prototypes without impacting the quality or innovation of the final product.”
