Academic Facets: News and Views from Spatial's University Community

3Dvia’s iPhone App for viewing CAD models is impressively responsive, but its just the first of many touch screen CAD interfaces that will appear in 2010. Read more...

Impressions from October’s Joint ACM/SIAM ‘Geometric and Physical Modeling’ Conference (GPM'09) in San Francisco. Some personal highlights from this annual meeting of leading CAD/CAM researchers …including, rumours of a “Grand Unified Theory” of geometric representations lurking round the corner! Read more...

Last week saw the release of the annual league table of academic research journals. Although the competition for prestige publishing is less intense in CAD/CAM research than say Physics, it is still interesting to check out the performance of one’s favorites. But beyond the commercially calculated impact factors, free bibliometric software is now allowing the automated interrogation of Google scholar’s database to identify all sorts of statistics including “the most important CAD/CAM research paper ever published” (allegedly)! Read more...

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3D interfaces are becoming ever more sophisticated with immersive, haptic systems giving users the opportunity to interact with complex shapes and assemblies like never before. But how can you measure if one system is better than another? How can you tell if stereo glasses make things 10% or 56% better? One answer, currently being investigated by academic researchers is inspired by the work of an American pioneer in 1911. Read more...

First email, then calendars, photographs, word processing and spreadsheets moved off the PC and onto the vast, networks of parallel computers that support the Internet. Now a small UK start-up has recently announced several million dollars of investment to make the “cloud” computing model work for CFD and FEA applications. Read more...

A potpourri blog containing: Why academics start every year with a frenzy of paper writing; in praise of the atan2 function; the mystery of ACIS’s exact birthday and the curious shape known as a 'Gömböc', (the product of highbrow maths, 3D modelling and ultra-precise layered manufacturing). Read more...

As the credit crunch sends engineering companies to the wall, the forced sale of their assets looks likely to be a regular feature of 2009. The obvious value is in the manufacturing hardware (eg. raw materials, presses, machine tools, painting booths, robots etc) but perhaps there are bargains to be had in the CADCAM/PLM data of bankrupt enterprises? Read more...

Initial Results of using MTurk for Geometric Reasoning in CAD/CAM applications Read more...

A novel interface to a 3D search engine uses game like CGI to combine automated search with human powers of recognition, to make a system that is potentially both useful and fun! Read more...

CAD systems are great tools for modifying existing models, but a lot less good at supporting the creative generation of new designs. However recently researchers in the UK and US have demonstrated systems that can, with human guidance, automatically suggest how shapes can be modified to create new variations. Read more...

Researcher are exploiting the cheap, but powerful, hardware designed to support computer games for serious applications Read more...

Digital preservation is an emerging topic in academic CAD/CAM research. Although it takes many forms it is all motivated by essentially the same problem, namely: “when all mankind’s design data is digital how do you preserve it for future generations?” Read more...

There are good reasons for the separation of geometry and topology in B-rep modellers but a relaxation of these “unwritten rules” might provide useful functionality for updating certain types of feature attributes. Read more...

What is a "Sells Hole" and why might it, one day, replace many traditional round holes? Read more...

Crowdsourcing, as a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. This post suggests the approach could have uses in CAD/CAM. Read more...

How do you hide a signature in an ACIS model without changing its size or shape? Read more...

Why can't CAD/CAM systems be more like Google Earth? Read more...

I quick summary of why I am here (or at least my best guess)! Read more...