I'm impressed. Jaded as I am by all things graphical--I published the first commercial computer graphics magazine in 1976, which later became Computer Graphics World--the stuff you can do so easily with the new Lattice 3D tools just blows me away.
Grab a 3D model from a CAD system--any CAD system. With a couple of clicks, paste it into a Word document. Now - right there in the Word document - rotate, pan, zoom, section, disassemble, and more. Without loss of resolution.
How is that possible? Here's the simple version. Lattice 3D technology takes the CAD model and "shrink-wraps" it with a bunch of (warning! techie-term alert!) NURBS patches - a particular kind of NURBS called "Gregory Patches." Never mind the technical stuff; what you get is a precise but "light-weight" representation of your 3D model.
To view it, the viewer software renders it at the desired resolution, appropriate to the context.
What you wind up with are beautifully realistic and precise models that take up <1% - 5% as much memory as the original.
The company's business model is simple: Give away viewers, sell authoring tools. (See their site for the full product line.) Hey, it works for Adobe, doesn't it?
(Speaking of which - why did Adobe choose competitor Right Hemisphere over Lattice? Must find out.)
Not just Word docs - spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, Web pages, and more can host dynamic 3D models. It's, well, breathtaking!
And the products are incredibly easy to use.
Lattice has contributed a big portion of their XVL format to the X3D Consortium. This company has been selling for 4 years in Japan as "Lattice," and for a year in the US, as "Lattice 3D." With 50 people, somewhere between $5 and $10 million in revenues, and already more than 250,000 users, this snowball is rollling.
