WorldCAD Access

Recently patented by Autodesk: '973 "Click to Accept As-Built Modeling"

A method to augment an as-built model (aka project):

1. A CAD drawing of a project is obtained, as well as a digital representation of a physical implementation of the project. 
2. A relationship is established to map the digital representation to the CAD drawing.
3. A component of the digital representation is identified based on the relationship (e.g., and a database/catalog).
4. Information about the identified component is transmitted to and displayed on a computer or mobile device.

The idea here is to coordinate what the technician sees in the field with the drawings of the project. It is meant for brownfield plants, ones that undergo frequent renovations. The renovations make the original 3D model obsolete; while laser scans are used today, they are labor-intensive.

This patent covers the idea of having field personal identify changes to the plant infrastructure that differ from CAD drawings, flag differences, and then choose from a variety of preconfigured possible configurations, and then click Accept -- using a portable device, like tablet or smartphone.

The patent further envisions a way for the technician take a photograph of the changed area, have software on a server identify the parts (from a database of vendor parts), and then generate a change order. Sensors in the tablet report the position of the photograph to the server.

www.google.com/patents/US20120116728

Bluebeam patents drawing compare

Bluebeam Software got patent #7,971,149 for the document comparison feature in its PDF Revu software. It does the following:

• Automatically scales, rotates, and aligns the selected base and revised drawings.
• Highlights differences with cloud annotations on a copy of the modified PDF.
• PDFs are synchronized; as you pan or zoom one, the other follows.
• Batch compare multiple revision sets.
• Select portions of drawings to compare.

 

Apple beats Dassault at patenting 3D virtual stores

One demo at SolidWorks World was Dassault demo'ing a 3D virtual store experience. I dunno DS is patenting it, but Patently Apple yesterday reported that Apple received a patent for just such an experience.

Patent 7,660,749 here.

Autodesk files to patent flood filling of anti-aliased boundaries

Filed a year aog, patent application number 12/352,801 describes:

A method of performing a flood fill on an image, the method comprising: determining image points to be flood filled based on the color of a seed point; and deblending this seed color from image points among the image points to be filled, where an image point is deblended based on its color and based on the seed color.

From the figures attached to Autodesk's application, it appears that the company is trying to solve this problem: how do you flood fill into a boundary made of anti-aliased lines? 

The problem is that anti-alised lines are made up of a number of colored pixels, and so a flood-fill algorithm has to which off-color pixels are part of the boundary. Autodesk's idea is to check the color and distance of neighbouring pixels. 

Apple applies to patent multi-touch viewing and moving of 3D objects

Gus Sentementes of The Baltimore Sun reports on a patent application filed by Apple last month, which explains a problem that 3D CAD users face:

There is a need for electronic devices with touch screen displays that provide more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for navigating in 3D virtual spaces and manipulating 3D objects in these virtual spaces.

The solution that Apple patented covers all devices, including multi-touch sensitive tablets, and involves the following manipulations by finger gestures:

•   Simultaneously zooming and translating (moving) 3D objects.

• Zooming objects to a predetermined size of the screen, and then returning to the original size -- with animated transitions.

• Changing 3D perspective viewpoints.

• Panning in various directions.

• Rotating and twisting the viewpoint and objects (separately) about various axes.

The patent becomes tedious to read...

("in response to detecting the multi-finger swipe gesture:if the multi-finger swipe gesture initially moves within a predetermined range of angles with respect to the touch screen display, displaying an animated rotation of the first three-dimensional virtual object about an axis in the plane of the touch screen display that is perpendicular to the direction of movement of the multi-finger swipe gesture while maintaining display of the second perspective in the three-dimensional virtual space")

...but it appears to me that the axes can be absolute (WCS) or relative to objects (UCS, in AutoCAD parlance). Also, there seems to also be an indication of multiple, independent viewports.

Patent application 20090303231 is here.

What's New in Autodesk Patents

Autodesk last summer applied to patent the navigation wheel found in some of its newer software.

Link to patent application 

More interesting is their patent application for a presumptive drafting solution:

...a relevant geometric entity is identified based on how the cursor is moved over the drawing. A presumptive drafting solution is then provided [such as object snaps] based on the identified... entity. In addition, prior drawing solutions... are obtained and compared to the... geometric attributes.

Patents are hard to read, but this one seems to do the following:

• Select geometry by the way the cursor moves over it (selection without picking)

• If more than one presumptive drafting solution is available, then a priority process sorts them.

• When the cursor moves nearly parallel to an entity, it receives a higher priority; nearly at right angles, low priority. See figure.

• Making an x-shaped movement near the center of a line performs a mid-point osnap.

• Making a circle-shaped movement near the end of a line performs endpoint osnap. See figure.

• Making either movement could also extend a line, or not. See figure.

• Pausing over a point identifies it.

• Rules can be applied so that rectangles on layer Desks are always 3" away from wall socket blocks; or blue circles are usually tangent to yellow lines.

The patent claims any kind of gesture, and may well indicate Autodesk's plans for touch-based CAD.

Link to this patent application.

Killing Software Patents Softly

The law suit against software patents grinds along. Well, it has nothing to do with software except in an inverted manner. 

Engineering News-Record's Melissa Traynor and Tom Sawyer report that a case involving business patents will be heard in December by the US Supreme Court. The US Patent Office rejected Bernard Bilski’s patent for a risk hedging method. 

The US Court of Appeals last October said that business-method patent applications must be tied to machines, or else transform one article into another. The former test required that patents produce "useful, concrete and tangible results."

Traynor and Sawyer do a good job interviewing those for and against changes to what can be patented. A worthwhile read. 

Killing software patents in the CAD industry would spur innovation, since competitors currently are wary of implementing features patented by others.

(HT: Darren Young)

Execs to Obama: Reform Patents, Pls.

24 tech execs, including Carl Bass of Autodesk, signed a letter asking for the American president's support on patent legislation now in the American congress, which would:

• Rreduce damages for patent infringement.
• Reduce court shopping.
• And other things not specified in the Reuters article. 

Autodesk is apparently the only CAD vendor to be a member of Coalition for Patent Fairness.

Source.

Geometric Patents 3D Searching

The USPTO grants Geometric patent #7,397,473 for searching 3D models based on shapes. 3DSearchIT works like this:

1. Prior to the search, the software generates 3D grids of the 3D models, and then computes 2D projections. The 2D projections are combined into 2D hierarchical representations, and then stored.
2. During the search, the software determines the similarity between two 3D shapes by comparing key coefficients of corresponding 2D hierarchical representations. 

Want to write your own 3D search engine? You’ll need to be familiar with discrete Fourier transforms, the Harr wavelet transform, and principal component analysis. The patent lists other systems of 3D searching and their limitations:

Statistical shape-based methods sample a large number of sample measures; the drawback is that their discriminating power decreases rapidly with increases in the number of models in the repository.

Graph-based methods generate connected skeletal approximations; the drawback is that it is difficult to adapt this method to models with multiple bodies or with surfaces.

Transform-based methods generated approximations of 3D models; the drawback is that their approximations are too indiscriminating for large repositories of models.

3DSearchIT works with parametric surfaces, polygonal facets, mesh approximations, and point-cloud approximations, from which it derives surface data. Inventor Tathagata Chakraborty has this to say about his method:

It has been observed that a small set of 2D projections, of sufficiently high resolution, can capture many key characteristics of most 3D CAD models, thereby providing a robust as well as an efficient paradigm to compare their shapes.

3dsearchit.geometricglobal.com

Do Little CAD Companies Patent?

We expect the IBMs and Autodesks of the world to generate patents, but what about the smaller CAD companies. I looked for and found a few:

Alibre

"Modeling three-dimensional objects on a computer system via a high bandwidth distributed network, facilitating the computing of intensive computer-aided design (CAD) tasks to take place on a series of servers." Patent number 6748419.

IronCAD

"...editing handles for solid shapes." Patent number 6781597.

Cadkey, Keycreator, Kubotek, Datacad, Graphisoft, VectorWorks

None. But some of these vendors might have patents in other countries.

Other smaller CAD companies, like Bentley Systems and CoCreate/HP, have a dozen or more patents.

Bonus: here is the flying machine patented by Orville Wright in 1903: patent number 821393. I wonder if the drawings are good enough to recreate the airplane?