VIS to reduce 3D file size from 40-100 times

BANGALORE, INDIA: 3D Solid Compression (3DSoC) is set to become the de-facto leader in interactive, collaborative and lightweight 3D solutions enabling businesses and consumers worldwide with universal access. 

In an exclusive interview with Genevieve Khongwir from CIOL, K.K. Venkatraman, CEO, 3DSoC, gives us an insight of the company, its offerings and the future of the company. Excerpts:

CIOL: Can you brief us on 3DSoC and the market segment you are targeting?

K.K.Venkatraman: 3DSoC was a spin out from Stanford and IISc (Indian Institute of Science) Bangalore and funded by IDG Ventures in Dec 2007.  Work started about five to six years back. The initial research started at Stanford, and the work was then carried out at IISc. 

We have a patent technology wherein we are able to reduce 3D file sizes significantly like anywhere from 40-100 times. This led to the opening of many possibilities in the visualization world like the introduction of 3D models in the mobile phones. 

There are three markets that we are looking into- 

1. E-manual publishing market: We create 3D manuals. Here, we license the products.
2. Education market: We do 3D learning capsules, very concise interactive content.
3. Mobile application market: We do Advergames, which is a little bit of an ad and a little of games for the consumer to engage with the phone. This increases stickiness, which ultimately provides for a higher brand recall. This is all possible because we are able to support very light content and bring it on the phone.

CIOL: Can you elaborate on Visual Solid Interactive?

K.K.V: Visual Solid Interactive (VIS) is our patent core technology. The extension of this technology is the .VIS format, which is similar to the .MP3 format, which is audio.

Under VIS, we have three products space namely, VIS Trans, VIS publisher and VIS Player.

VISTrans: This translates and compresses your existing models into VIS format that are upto 100 times smaller for download. VISTrans currently supports translations from STL, VRML, Lightwave, Wavefront OBJ, Maya and 3DStudio into VIS models. The translated VIS files are 10 to 100 times smaller than the original files. VISTrans can also be run in batch mode, and the files are translated to VIS format in a few seconds.

VIS Publisher: Once the model is reduced into the VIS format, one can create interactive 3D content and can be enhanced by adding animation, text and audio content in the VIS publisher and then published on the VIS player. 

VIS Player: The player enables interactive viewing of the animated VIS models. It allows full graphical interaction (rotate, pan, zoom) and can be run standalone or from any standard web browser (e.g. IE, FireFox) and now on the mobile phone platform.

CIOL: How does your VIS technology helps in reducing file size between 10 to 40 times over comparable representations used for 3D visualization?

K.K.V: VIS technology is a new form of representation. The analogy I can give is the audio CD to MP3. In an audio CD, you can store about 12 songs, but in MP3, you can cramp up to 150 songs.  One big difference here is MP3 is somewhat lossy and if you are a true audio fan, you will make out the difference in the audio quality between the original audio file and the compressed MP3 file.

However, in our format, we do not lose anything. It is a very loss less compression. There is no loss of visual or geometric accuracy in the model. All of that is intact. We are taking the existing models and encoding them into a completely new format where I have more control and abstract them in many interpretations. It is a completely new way of representing things. Like converting a doc file to a PDF format.

CIOL: How does your technology helps in designing training modules for technical and science education in the area of e learning?

K.K.V: Let me explain with an example. We have a customer, PS Institute of Technology, an engineering college in Bangalore, for whom we develop a lot of learning capsules.

We construct a lightweight 3D model with a lot of interactivity that gets played out. The file sizes are 20-30 kilobytes, which can be easily distributed over the Internet, and one can interact with the model, which is different from a movie file.

In e-learning, we can develop very rich interactive 3D content and distributed over the browser or the Web. It can be used for classroom teaching and can also be stored in the University intranet and students can access it later. 

CIOL: How can a developer build powerful and lightweight applications for mobile devices using VIS?

K.K.V: There are two ways of building mobile applications. It follows the same products sequence, i.e., VIS Trans, VIS Publisher and VIS Player.

Suppose, one does not have a CAD (Computer-aided design) or 3D model, which cannot be translated or compressed. Then here we have a modeling platform VISdom, which helps to create a 3D model from scratch, and one can add interactivity, audio, then publish and play it on the player. 

One can publish it on the desktop or the mobile. There are two formats that it can be saved and published on: there is the desktop version of VIS player and the mobile version of the player. Therefore, the creation environment is on the desktop, and the player is on the desktop, Internet/browser and on the mobile platform as well. 

CIOL:  Do you have any plans to focus on verticals like manufacturing, heavy engineering and automobiles to develop 3D advertisements and product demos? 

K.K.V: Let me take another example here: Triveni Engineering is a manufacturing company, which is into power generation and supplies huge turbines to customers.

When they sell a turbine to a customer right from the installation to servicing to support service they distribute paper manuals. Even if they have CAD models, they are too heavy to distribute. 

There is also another issue wherein the customers may not have the software such as AutoCAD where the 3D designs is built on. Designers may have the software, but a customer may not have. The end customer and front-end technician will have paper manuals or 2D manuals. Therefore, we take the CAD models compress them and convert them into 3D models. 

We enhance with the addition of voice, animation and content interactivity and make them into 3D e-manuals, which has to be accessed by the front-end technician.

CIOL: Who are the customers you are targeting? 

K.K.V: There are two types of customers that we are looking at. The first is the enterprise customers who are aware of 3D and its challenges and distributing platform. They are aware of the value propositions when we go to them.

Second, those who are more towards retail play. They look at very rich interactive and interesting formats that can be distributed. With ads, we relate to video, which are very heavy and simple animated images. However, we are going in between. We are developing advergames, which are sticky content, and less than 100 kilobytes that can reach a number of phones. Through this, one can do target campaigning.

Recently, for a brand, we pushed content using Bluetooth, which we did during the IPL. We developed Advergames. We introduced two games and registered about 4500-5000 downloads for each game. 

When a consumer walks in and receives a game, he/she tends to get engaged with the game rather than just the normal text messages of score updates, coupons, etc. This happens mainly in a shopping mall where there is a good chance of your receiving them, rather than in a closed environment like in an office or a house.

CIOL: What does the future hold for 3DSoC? 

K.K.V: We are broadly enabling 3D for all. We are trying to reach not only the enterprise but also on the consumer end. The market has changed and we are trying to democratize 3D. We have overcome the challenge of size, and now the distribution platform. We have since moved to the mobile platform. 

We will soon be on the iPhone as well. We are six months old, post funding. We are planning to continue to build on our strengths in the domestic market, and we will go global by the end of the year or early of next year.