SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual aka SWV6 at SWW13
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Today Fielder Hiss took the main stage at SolidWorks World and revealed a new product that will be delivered from Dassault Systemes to focus on the conceptual design process. A few things we know after this morning...
- It is built on the "3DExperience Platform"
- It is focused on conceptual design (thus the intuitive name?, looks like they are taking after Microsoft in the marketing department)
- Will be able to move the concept over to SolidWorks for further design completion
- Appears to have modeling and assembly capabilities.
- Design process starts in a similar layout sketch feature with associative nature (like layout sketches in SolidWorks)
- Has integrated version management for keeping track of concepts (looked similar to snapshots in LDR in SolidWorks combined with a similar swapping capability of that in SolidWorks configurations.
- Will perform Simulation
- Has integrated Chat
- Has screen sharing
- History-based and Direct Editing
- Can share to private collaboration social platform (like posting screen shots and markups with threaded discussions)
- Will be available on Mobile
There was no use of the word "Cloud" which leads me to believe they learned their lesson back in 2010, however they did mention that it was "always connected". The product appears to be installed locally (maybe a lightweight framework) with its data populated from DS own servers. They also mentioned the ability to save state in order to address the instance of connectivity unexpectedly disconnecting so data stability in in tact.
There were no bits on pricing or how anyone would pay for it but they are going to be finding customers that would like to try it out for production., which they described as a test case and not a "beta test". Although that sounds like semantics, this is DS asking for direct input which is very positive.
Once this private test is complete, DS will open this up for public trials in October/ November this year. I have heard this before with products like Live Buildings and the original SolidWorks V6 platform since 2010. The only part of today that makes me think they might be aggressive in their attempts to meet meet those dates was the amount of detail they showed. Unlike 3 years ago, this looked like a product that could be used and not a technical trial and vision product that they got working on stage in Anaheim.
I am sure more details will come out over the next couple of days but so far this looks like a pretty feature-rich tool but hands on with actual users will tell the truth. More to come soon... ~Lou
