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Panel: Light-weight 3D formats and standards: a cooperative solution or collision course?
Moderator: David Prawel, Longview Advisors Inc.
ISO 10303 (STEP) has been helping companies share product information for more than 20 years. AP203 second edition (E2) is now approved and in early use, and a major enhancement it is indeed. There is clearly a valuable place for industry standards like STEP, IGES before it and many others. More recently, a generation of broadly popular light-weight 3D file formats has emerged on the global scene - Acrobat 3D, DWF, JT, 3D XML, XVL - and they are poised to add real value in supply chain and downstream interoperability and collaboration. When do you need a full-precise sold representation, and when will a “light-weight” 3D format do the job? MP3 has become a de facto standard for music listening even though it has less quality than the original recording. Might light-weight 3D formats like U3D be heading in the same direction - not a perfect copy of a precise 3D solid, but perhaps good enough for a broad range of collaborative uses? When are industry standards the best choice, or when might a light weight 3D format work as well, or perhaps a hybrid is best – a format which contains another standard format? What factors should be considered when assessing the trade-offs between cooperatively developed industry standards and a proprietary, but widely used, data format? And when are both approaches appropriate? This panel is a rare opportunity to participate in an interactive discussion with the vendors of these important formats and members of the global standards bodies who develop and support industry standards like STEP and U3D. This is your chance to answer some of the tough questions in your interoperability and collaboration strategies as they pertain to sharing 3D product data.
