Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Project Orchestra (The world’s first collaborative professional 3D design tool)
Période du rapport: 2021-08-01 au 2022-07-31
Design costs money, and inefficient design processes cost businesses billions of euros annually. Design compromises, inefficiencies, or mistakes have major knock-on impacts on downstream processes such as manufacturing, materials procurement, and sales.
Poor design is typically a by-product of inefficient design workflow and suboptimal communication. Traditional product design workflows involve hundreds of conceptual pen and paper sketches, which are then manually transcribed into a 2D graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator and then passed onto CAD technicians to turn into a precise 3D model. The need to then apply engineering constraints to enable manufacturability, and the need to convert rough 2D sketches into precise 3D models mean that much of the original design intent is lost in this process. As a result, many rounds of iteration between the designer, CAD technician, and engineer are required to ensure that the aesthetics of the design, ergonomics, usability and engineering constraints are all respected in the final product. By the time engineers, marketers or management give their input into a design there is already a large sunk cost, with fewer opportunities for change, and inherently less time to improve design.
In addition, the design workflow typically isolates the designer from the rest of the team, and sometimes even from other designers working on the same product, which impedes or delays the feedback process from engineering, management, or marketing teams. This results in feedback and buy-in being received too late, and therefore some designs being sent “back to the drawing board”, resulting in weeks or even months of wasted effort. This inefficiency is seen across the broader industrial and consumer product design space, and extends into architecture, footwear design, and design for film, animation and computer games.
With current state-of-the-art solutions, designers are restricted in their ability to create directly in 3D, and also require frequent travels to conduct design reviews with stakeholders. By enabling design teams to ideate and refine models directly in 3D, and involve stakeholders remotely through real-time collaboration features, will have the following societal impacts:
- Democratisation: Supporting low-cost educational access to our tools is a key part of our dissemination strategy, as it creates a win-win – societal benefits in educational terms and the democratisation of design, coupled with the embedding of our software in artists’ and designers’ “default toolkit” – making competence with Gravity Sketch a standard employers will look for
- Accessibility: Gravity Sketch has been consciously designed to be easy to learn for designers with dyslexia or dyspraxia. Academic studies have shown that the prevalence of dyslexia among art and design students can be as much as 11 times higher (at 13-15% of all arts and design students) than among Economics students, for example. The controls in Gravity Sketch work using physical hand gestures; there is no wordy teaching manual, and we are continuously refining the tool to make it as intuitive to use as possible
- Regional economy: Orchestra will benefit regional and local design studios because it enables them to compete for business remotely, without needing to relocate to cities or industry hubs
- Environment: Orchestra is a software which enacts the recommendations of government environmental organisations by reducing the requirement for designers to travel in order to collaborate. Its ability to substitute for physical modelling is also beneficial. The automotive industry in particular uses thousands of tonnes of unrecyclable plastic in its “clay” modelling of vehicles annually. VR tools have been estimated to be able to cut physical modelling across all industries by up to 70%
Our mission is to embed our tools in the workflow of every professional designer in the world, making our software a universal standard on the same level as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word. With Project Orchestra, our strategic objectives are:
- Enable creation and real-time collaboration across hardware devices (e.g. VR, desktop, iPad) whilst ensuring the highest standards of usability, reliability, and scalability.
- To ensure Orchestra is compatible with all VR hardware and other common hardware platforms without bias and without sacrificing the value proposition.
- To develop strong technical and commercial relationships with strategic partners: VR hardware manufacturers, graphics card and chipset providers; software developers in the ecosystem.
- To ensure the continued education and evangelisation of Orchestra – by the company, users, and educational institutions.
The specific objectives for Project Orchestra are:
- Integrity: Ensure product is robust and reliable at all times when operated with reasonable hardware specifications and Internet connectivity. Enable Orchestra in the Cloud and via enterprise servers.
- Scalability: Extend to multiple users with sufficient objects in the VR environment.
- Compatibility: Enable use across multiple hardware platforms with consistency of experience.
- Launch preparation: IP protection of innovations; user testing and sign-off; preparations for communication of results.
Poor design is typically a by-product of inefficient design workflow and suboptimal communication. Traditional product design workflows involve hundreds of conceptual pen and paper sketches, which are then manually transcribed into a 2D graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator and then passed onto CAD technicians to turn into a precise 3D model. The need to then apply engineering constraints to enable manufacturability, and the need to convert rough 2D sketches into precise 3D models mean that much of the original design intent is lost in this process. As a result, many rounds of iteration between the designer, CAD technician, and engineer are required to ensure that the aesthetics of the design, ergonomics, usability and engineering constraints are all respected in the final product. By the time engineers, marketers or management give their input into a design there is already a large sunk cost, with fewer opportunities for change, and inherently less time to improve design.
In addition, the design workflow typically isolates the designer from the rest of the team, and sometimes even from other designers working on the same product, which impedes or delays the feedback process from engineering, management, or marketing teams. This results in feedback and buy-in being received too late, and therefore some designs being sent “back to the drawing board”, resulting in weeks or even months of wasted effort. This inefficiency is seen across the broader industrial and consumer product design space, and extends into architecture, footwear design, and design for film, animation and computer games.
With current state-of-the-art solutions, designers are restricted in their ability to create directly in 3D, and also require frequent travels to conduct design reviews with stakeholders. By enabling design teams to ideate and refine models directly in 3D, and involve stakeholders remotely through real-time collaboration features, will have the following societal impacts:
- Democratisation: Supporting low-cost educational access to our tools is a key part of our dissemination strategy, as it creates a win-win – societal benefits in educational terms and the democratisation of design, coupled with the embedding of our software in artists’ and designers’ “default toolkit” – making competence with Gravity Sketch a standard employers will look for
- Accessibility: Gravity Sketch has been consciously designed to be easy to learn for designers with dyslexia or dyspraxia. Academic studies have shown that the prevalence of dyslexia among art and design students can be as much as 11 times higher (at 13-15% of all arts and design students) than among Economics students, for example. The controls in Gravity Sketch work using physical hand gestures; there is no wordy teaching manual, and we are continuously refining the tool to make it as intuitive to use as possible
- Regional economy: Orchestra will benefit regional and local design studios because it enables them to compete for business remotely, without needing to relocate to cities or industry hubs
- Environment: Orchestra is a software which enacts the recommendations of government environmental organisations by reducing the requirement for designers to travel in order to collaborate. Its ability to substitute for physical modelling is also beneficial. The automotive industry in particular uses thousands of tonnes of unrecyclable plastic in its “clay” modelling of vehicles annually. VR tools have been estimated to be able to cut physical modelling across all industries by up to 70%
Our mission is to embed our tools in the workflow of every professional designer in the world, making our software a universal standard on the same level as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word. With Project Orchestra, our strategic objectives are:
- Enable creation and real-time collaboration across hardware devices (e.g. VR, desktop, iPad) whilst ensuring the highest standards of usability, reliability, and scalability.
- To ensure Orchestra is compatible with all VR hardware and other common hardware platforms without bias and without sacrificing the value proposition.
- To develop strong technical and commercial relationships with strategic partners: VR hardware manufacturers, graphics card and chipset providers; software developers in the ecosystem.
- To ensure the continued education and evangelisation of Orchestra – by the company, users, and educational institutions.
The specific objectives for Project Orchestra are:
- Integrity: Ensure product is robust and reliable at all times when operated with reasonable hardware specifications and Internet connectivity. Enable Orchestra in the Cloud and via enterprise servers.
- Scalability: Extend to multiple users with sufficient objects in the VR environment.
- Compatibility: Enable use across multiple hardware platforms with consistency of experience.
- Launch preparation: IP protection of innovations; user testing and sign-off; preparations for communication of results.
The work conducted this period (1 Aug 2020 - 31 Jul 2021) was mainly split into three themes:
- Project kick off and planning
- User research and testing to inform scoping and development work
- Development and testing
In terms of user research and testing, we leveraged our community base, university partners, and current and prospective customers. This involved shipping them loaner Oculus Quest 2 headsets, and conducting interviews through a combination of videoconferencing, and later once the prototype was stable enough, meeting directly in VR for collaboration. The questions asked were mainly to gain a deeper understanding of their current workflows: how they currently do things, which software they use for which parts of the workflow and why, current pain points, and how they thought Orchestra could help solve their challenges.
In terms of development and testing, we have completed the tasks as per workplan.
We have also commenced other planned tasks and are on track versus project timelines. We have submitted all deliverables required and have achieved the target KPIs. These are detailed in the technical report and deliverables.
- Project kick off and planning
- User research and testing to inform scoping and development work
- Development and testing
In terms of user research and testing, we leveraged our community base, university partners, and current and prospective customers. This involved shipping them loaner Oculus Quest 2 headsets, and conducting interviews through a combination of videoconferencing, and later once the prototype was stable enough, meeting directly in VR for collaboration. The questions asked were mainly to gain a deeper understanding of their current workflows: how they currently do things, which software they use for which parts of the workflow and why, current pain points, and how they thought Orchestra could help solve their challenges.
In terms of development and testing, we have completed the tasks as per workplan.
We have also commenced other planned tasks and are on track versus project timelines. We have submitted all deliverables required and have achieved the target KPIs. These are detailed in the technical report and deliverables.
Our 60 fps VR-VR real-time collaboration feature is already beyond state of the art. Currently, real time collaboration software have only achieved view and import/move only. This is a lot simpler than incorporating edit capabilities in a real-time collaboration setting. This is because the data that needs to be sent and synced across devices is a lot simpler and limited for view/import/move only (each object imported is a binary: it exists or it does not). To enable edit capabilities, all the transitional states of an edited objects need to be communicated, the order in which edits happened have to be communicated, and the timeline of who edited what first also needs to be factored in. All these need to be synchronised across unstable Wifi network connections.
Results and estimated impacts at the end of the project are as anticipated and are detailed in the technical report and deliverables.
Results and estimated impacts at the end of the project are as anticipated and are detailed in the technical report and deliverables.