Hollywood’s Vision of Future CAD

Hollywood’s Vision of Future CAD

I’m not one who frequently goes to the movies but since my wife and I had a gift cards given to us we decided to catch a flick last night. We went and saw Iron Man. I’m not going to discuss the story go see it yourself. However there is one scene that I will mention as it does relate to CAD.

In the lead character’s workshop we see Tony Stark designing the second generation of the Iron Man armor. He is standing in front of a bank of computer monitors on which is displayed several windows of technical information in what appears to be some sort of design software. Tony merely points at a window showing a CAD model of the suit and drags the window from one monitor to another and finally to a large table like surface. I’m thinking, oh great here is the Microsoft tie in using their ‘Surface’ technology but then I see the model actually take on a 3D holographic appearance that Tony manipulates with his bare hands. In another scene Tony actually inserts his arm into one of these holographic models to test form, fit and function. WOW!

Even if you’re not a fan of movies based on comic books you might want to check out Iron Man just to see one vision of what CAD design software might look like in the future. Can anyone say SolidWorks 2010?

Running on empty

Running on empty

If you haven’t noticed I will fill you in. It seems that I’ve hit a sort of writer’s block. I’ve been racking my mind to come up with things to write about the last few days. I perused the engineering magazines that came in last week thinking I would find some ideas but nothing interested me enough to write about. If there is anyone interested in doing a guest blog let me know.

We have a project I just started working on at Byers this week. It could be an interesting project if we ever get enough design parameters to get going on it. But due to our confidentiality agreement I can’t really write much about it. Suffice to say that a rather large international company has bought out another company and is in the process of moving the manufacture of the company’s product to the US. Our part in all this is to reverse engineer the handling systems to US standards. Because of the scope and the time limits involved we will be bringing in outside engineering to assist.

One thing that is going on here that might interest only me is the possibility of major computer and network infrastructure upgrades. Our in house IT head has been discussing our options with Dell. This will be the 1^st time since the Digital Equipment days that we are looking to one vendor for all our IT needs. Most of the PCs here don’t need to be CAD capable but with these upgrades the basic PCs will be more powerful that our current CAD stations. The workstations will be Dell Precisions built up with good quadro video cards and 4GB ram. Like I said, I’m excited! The one thing I’m not excited about is the fact that management is leaning towards Vista over XP. Their reasoning is that we will have to make the change eventually so we might as well do it now. Being a guy who reads all the computer magazines and listens to the tech podcasts I can say true fully that this scares the crap out of me.

Is there anyone out there using Vista? What’s the verdict?