Cloud computing is a hot topic right now, particularly in the world of Computer Aided Design. The recent acquisition of GrabCAD by Stratasys http://blog.grabcad.com/blog/2014/09/16/big-news/ shows how it is impacting into 3D printing too.
Polygonica, which widely caters for the 3D Printing market, often gets asked the question:
Does Polygonica run in the cloud? The answer is easy: Yes.
This is because we are a component technology; Polygonica generally provides a small but important part of the overall user experience, whether that is on the cloud, on a mobile device, or on the desktop. Our customers and partners typically provide the user interface piece of the puzzle.
This was illustrated by our partners at Tech Soft 3D, who integrated Polygonica with their HOOPS Communicator product to provide a proof-of-concept demonstration of a web portal for a 3D Printing bureau. Here, HOOPS Communicator provides the server based rendering and interaction; HOOPS Exchange adds support for multiple CAD formats, and Polygonica runs behind the scenes to provide the heavy-lifting required to analyse, heal and shell the geometry. Add a little bit of JavaScript to glue it all together, and you have a compelling cloud application. The user does not need to download or install any software; a standard web browser is all that's needed.
Perhaps cloud computing is not so new after all; as Bertrand Sicot (@BertrandSicot) - the CEO of SolidWorks - pointed out at the recent Tech Soft 3D technical summit in Munich. He is old enough (as am I) to remember the era of the mainframe. In those days, you sat at a dumb terminal accessing a computer you never saw and all your data was centralised.
More information on Tech Soft 3D's range of cloud, mobile and desktop products can be found at www.techsoft3d.com.
