SOLIDWORKS And the Immortal Bard

April 23^rd marks the 400^th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. And what you may ask has the has the Immortal Bard have to do with SOLIDWORKS or even CAD in general? Well while most of our customers use SOLIDWORKS to design the future, some (myself included) use it to recreate the past. We do it for many different reasons, as a piece of virtual archaeology to recreate something that has been lost, or as a piece of investigative history so we can better understand what occurred in the past and propose theories behind why things happened the way they did.

Mike Sabocheck is helping a team build the Tucker “Torpedo” a car that was never built, and you can follow his progress here.

The Tucker Torpedo Being Built in SOLIDWORKS

Our parent company Dassault Systèmes, a few years ago, took all the accumulated archaeological information about the Great Pyramids of Giza and created a 3D landscape where teachers and students could really understand this amazing landscape. See that project here. A more recent 3D recreation from Dassault Systèmes centers on the Normandy Landings in 1944, which can be seen here. This effort is a way of preserving our technological heritage while the people involved are still around to fill in the gaps in a fragmented historical record.

A WACO Glider recreated on the 3DExperience Platform

So today you can re-create the past in incredible detail, as well as build the future, inside of SOLIDWORKS. And that got me thinking, with the advent of affordable AR and VR glasses you could recreate a 3D landscape and almost be in the past. How cool would that be! It would turn the teaching of history on its head. I am sure I would have paid more attention in my English Literature class if I was rewarded by walking around 16^th century London.

Dassault Systèmes CEO Experiencing Virtual Reality with the ODG Glasses at SOLIDWORKS World 2016

This brings me back to Shakespeare, I mentioned the Shakespeare anniversary in passing to my colleague Mark Schneider and in less than a day he had created an awesome Globe Theater in SOLIDWORKS.

It looks okay in SOLIDWORKS but as soon as you render the model in SOLIDWOKS Visualize, you feel as if you are almost there.

As the technologies of CAD, rendering and virtual reality converge virtual holidays to anywhere and any when will become available. Tomorrow the past will just be just like anywhere else, another place to visit, explore and learn.

So the question to you is where and when will you recreate?