Over at InsideHPC, they caught up with VCollab’s CEO Prasad Mandava at ISC10 and sat down to talk about their VCollab product and how it relates to their new Marechi.com launch.  In short, VCollab is a 3D Model visualization tool, and Marechi.com is a specialized social network for sharing of these 3D models.

Marechi lets you share your 3D models/simulations and socially network with like-minded engineers. This should be of particular interest to the HPC Community because now they can easily reduce, publish and share not only the static 3D data but also the interactive simulations from their scientific computations/discoveries. Marechi uses the state-of-the-art VCollab solution as the foundation for publishing 3D content and also to visualize the physics/simulations thru the free interactive VCollab 3D Viewer.

VCollab is interesting because of it’s two-fold abilities:

  • VCollab can shrink models by as much as 99% through the use of their converter, which they offer in a batch-mode HPC version for super-large models
  • They offer a simple lightweight viewer and plugin that can allow you to embed these models into websites or Office Documents

Targeted at CAD designers, they claim it will work with simulation outputs as well, although I personally have my doubts of achieving 99% compression on simulation isosurfaces and such. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting technology for those who have to work with groups spread over a wide distance and find remote visualization technologies cumbersome.

via VCollab Launches Social Network for 3D Visualization | insideHPC.com.