HOUSTON – If you make videos and you’d like for people on the Internet to see them, that’s easy: Just post them to YouTube (or Vimeo, for that matter). Want people to watch those videos on your own personal or corporate web site? Not a problem. YouTube gives you a piece of code that allows you to embed that video in whichever web page you choose.
Now what do you do if you make 3D models and you’d like people to be able to manipulate them and take measurements, but you don’t want them to have to have a special piece of software on their desktops to view them?
That’s where Seymour 3D comes in, what its developers are calling the YouTube for 3D models.
Thanks to html5 and other standards development on the Web, “you can use 3D interactive models in just the same way you can use text and images,” said Bernard Frischer, head of Frischer Consulting and the developer of Seymour, here at SPAR International last week. “Now users can see even gigabyte-sized models without downloads or plug-ins.”
Further, because of the way Seymour 3D is being designed, the owner of the model will be able to control who sees it and when, and will have copyright and intellectual property protections.
There will also be any number of options for how the model can be displayed, and “users will able to pan, change lighting and mercurials,” he said “They can take measurements and take notes. They can even render out high-res images once they set up the views they want.”
And, just like YouTube, you’ll be able to embed those models in your own web site with a simple embed code. It isn’t difficult to imagine applications for museums, educational web sites, retail sites, and, of course, internal sites so that everyone within an organization can have access to 3D data and models in a functional way.
Sounds great. Where do I sign up? Frischer said he’s in late beta right now and that the company is targeting June for an unveiling. Currently, no web site has been made live.
