Staying ahead in VR by creating rich data sets

Virtalis operates in the AR/VR industry and provider of immersive visualisation solutions that cover the full lifecycle of the product, from conceptual design to distribution.

Visionary Render is Virtalis’ flagship platform for importing and visualising large datasets from a range of sources, while maintaining all the geometry, naming hierarchies, metadata, and product & manufacturing information (PMI).

Virtalis is focused on supporting industrial applications and manufacturers creating large complex products for aerospace, defence and automotive, as well as construction, geoscience, consumer goods, and more. Accurately supporting the formats used in this wide range of industries is critical because companies need to visualise large amounts of data from diverse sources.

Being able to review the data in an immersive environment on a one-to-one scale, rather than seeing a 2D view of a 3D object is effective for communicating to people who aren’t skilled in CAD.

“When we import CAD data with HOOPS Exchange, we get the data that we expect,” said Barry King, Product Owner at Virtalis. “Our customers expect to see reliable data when they’re making important decisions based on visualisations and having reliable and dependable data is one of the most important things for them. What’s great about HOOPS is that it supports almost all the formats, including VRML. 

“Our customers have legacy data, and we rely on the fact that HOOPS Exchange supports those formats. Often our customers will challenge us with data and we can say, ‘no problem.’ We can support this wide variety of formats because we have HOOPS behind us.”

Virtalis goes beyond visualising CAD data from an external view by immersing users in the environment where the model may live, allowing them to experience the product.

Gavin England, Product Marketing Manager at Virtalis, said: “We’re looking at products in the context of where they sit. We could be looking at a product installed inside a factory, or a building structure coming from building information modelling (BIM) data. In addition to the core formats, being able to bring in data like Revit is key as well.”

HOOPS Exchange provides access to a broad range of data including B-Rep geometry, metadata, PMI, model tree, views, persistent IDs, styles, construction geometry, visualisation and more – all without depending on any CAD system. This wide-ranging access proved to be an important element in Virtalis’ decision-making process.

“When we initially were getting to grips and integrating it, Tech Soft 3D was really responsive and collaborated with us to get the results that we needed,” added King. “When we communicate an issue, we always get it fixed in the next release, and the releases come out steadily and reliably.” That’s very important and a real benefit for us. 

“Whether they’re working with engineering or science data, a lot of customers are learning how much time and money they can save by leveraging immersive visualisation and not having to build physical prototypes. This helps them make better business decisions – and Tech Soft 3D plays a critical role in supporting those workflows.”