ThingWorx Studio feedback

[fguerra]

Hello,

I have been using TWX studio for almost a year and I have seen the evolution of the tool since its early beginning as ThingX.

I shared already some feedback about the tool and most of the points had taken in consideration so that’s good but they are still some points that are decision makers (at least on my company) for our future AR/VR platform.

3D PoI interaction: Use Points of Interests (PoI) directly linked with a 3D model, 3D label or 3D image allowing the users to interact with this PoI as links to other documents, webpages or other pages of the same experiences.

Image/Shape recognition: The ThingMarks are good and useful on some use cases but they are others when image or shape recognition is useful and a best approach than a marker (eg. Have AR overall information of a building, a plant or a microgrid from outside).

Get remote resources (Web, other databases, windchill): Having all the resources uploaded with the experience is not the best approach if we want to maintain an homogeneus and controlled environment with several AR experiences sharing similar information, also the possibility to have always the most updated 3D model coming from our PDM or another shared database is a real gamechanger.

Create trade viewer app: no “thingWorx view” but for example “Schneider Electric AR view”.

Would be great to hear from you if is a plan to include these points and some dates of where will be available if they will.

Here some other improvement points that would be great to take in consideration:

ThingWorx Studio Management:

• Implement user defined experience templates (with icons, logos, themes and models pre-loaded)
• Implement collaborative projects to have more than one people working on the same project.
• Implement Version Management for the experiences.
• Create an easy way (in the app) to copy/duplicate projects
• Define roles to ThingWrox Studio with different level of access.

3D Container

• Include the possibility to modify the rotation/translation coordinate system without modifying the 3D model in Creo view/illustrate

Other cool features to add:

• Record User/device location and interact according the location

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards

Felix Guerra

[katte]

Felix Guerra​ All nice reviews, we shall definitely pass the reviews. Quick thoughts:

• Collaborative projects - I guess, if it is feasible you can setup ThingWorx Studio in a hosted server and have more than one person access studio in creating projects.
• Copy/duplicate projects - there is a way to duplicate projects, please refer Copy Thingworx Studio Projects

-Giri

[fguerra]

Hi Giri, thank you for the answer,

The ThingWorx Studio hosed in a server is a good idea but without version/user management would be kind of messy, you can have different users managed in ThingWorx but not sure that more than one user can access and modify the same experience (perhaps they can).

Regarding the copy and duplicated projects I know that there is a way but I believe is not as simple as you described in your answer, you need also to modify the appConfig.json changing the name of the experience, also for an already published experience you will have a lot of extra data in the project folder that you don't need if you're creating/duplicating a project.

Most of the points have workarounds to make them work, so that's good, but at the end one of the interesting selling points of Studio is that is intended for people with low programing skills, I think the tricks must be little by little becoming features in the tool (like the audio and video widgets ).

I would like to hear from you something about the decision maker points I described above, those are important for us and we're founding our decision on an Augmented Reality tools, between other thinks, on those points.

[mschuetz · Accepted solution]

Hi Felix,

Great questions. Let me provide some answers to your decision makers questions:

3D PoI interaction: We are working on it right now and plan to provide the basic functionality in the next release at May 4^th.

Image/Shape recognition: This is a very important topic for us when it comes down to object tracking. We are working on it and have POC ready to share with you if you are interested. But keep in mind a ThingMark also identifies the individual instance of the object and provides information to the end-user that an AR experience exists for this product. These points have to be solved differently if you go without a ThingMark. We plan to provide CAD based tracking functionality in the second half of 2017.

Get remote resources (Web, other databases, Windchill): this also an important project we plan to complete in the second half of 2017. We already put some mechanisms in place to separate the content from the experience itself as you can see with the CREO AR solution. We have a clear plan to treat 3D content in the same way we treat properties in ThingWorx. Hence “remote” access of 3D objects from e.g. Windchill would be much easier and the experiences would load it on-demand.

Create trade viewer app: The creation of custom apps is also part of our FY 2017 goals.

So good news, all your decision maker criteria are planned to ship in 2017.

BTW… I hope to see you at LiveWorx again in a few weeks.

Thanks

Marc