Million-dollar grant secures global rollout for 'Star Trek' design tool
Innovation
IT transforms a clunky, one-dimensional planning nightmare into a living, breathing design experience.
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The world’s first virtual reality design tool CADwalk will expand from South Australia to the Europe and North America thanks to a new million-dollar commercialisation grant.
Awarded to control room solutions company JumboVision International, the AU$1 million comes courtesy of the Accelerating Commercialisation element of the Australian Federal Government’s Entrepreneurs Programme.
“This grant is a validation of an innovative concept that we developed to counter design frustration,” said JumboVision General Manager Lena Kimenkowski.
“CADwalk is now a tool we can take to an expanded global stage.”
The CADwalk product simplifies design and layout planning processes for control rooms and other high-density technical environments.
Rather than months of back-and-forth correspondence involving stakeholders poring over computer screens and printed plans, JumboVision’s CADwalk creates a 3D, walk-in, moveable design experience that allows clients to visualise and plot arrangements of furniture and technical equipment in real time.
JumboVision is currently offering CADwalk to a client base in Australia and the Asia Pacific through the CAVE facility based in Adelaide, South Australia and another to be opened soon in Perth, Western Australia.
The recently awarded commercialisation monies will allow Jumbo Vision to add Europe and North America to its CADwalk market portfolio, and transition the product into a standalone business entity.
“We will use the grant money and our own matched funds to invest in CADwalk infrastructure and personnel, and technology to establish Centres of Excellence to expand our business activities,” said Kimenkowski.
CADwalk was developed by JumboVision working with Professor Bruce Thomas at the Wearable Computing Laboratory, University of South Australia.
It applies software plus 2D and 3D stereoscopic projectors and motion-tracking cameras to create life size room simulations that can be modified in real time.
Operating in a 180 square metre floor space with a 10m wall screen, CADwalk projects desired room layouts onto the floor in 1:1 scale, assigning tracking devices to an unlimited number of objects such as desks, server racks or machinery. The floor and wall images move in sync when any tracker is moved.
CADwalk has been likened to the virtual reality facility Holodeck in the Star Trek universe.
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