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The Future of Digital Product (Industrial) Design Tools

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설명

This session will take a look at the future of digital industrial-design tools. We’ll explore how our tools are evolving from the perspective of function and user experience to capture the users and creative workflows of tomorrow.

주요 학습

  • Gain a better understanding of the technologies and tools coming soon.
  • See how collaboration and customer first can truly make better products.
  • Learn about how open source, templates, and machine learning can democratize and unleash creative potential.
  • See how real-world design paradigms can be applied to digital modeling tools—and how such tools are evolving.

발표자

  • Philip Botley
    Phil Botley is the Alias Product Manager and has been working in the Auto Surfacing and Visualisation world for over 28 years, first using Alias back in 1996. He is based in the UK and spends time travelling between Alias Development centres (Toronto and Hannover) and Customer sites.
  • Daniel Wright 님의 아바타
    Daniel Wright
    Daniel Wright from UK based in Munich, Germany has worked in the Automotive Space for 10+ years. Working for companies such as Audi, BMW and many other German OEMs through agencies to produce technical illustrations and CGi Animations which we may know from the Autoshows around the world. Daniel now working within Autodesk directly is using his skills to help technically in Transportation Design space to support sales and marketing along with product development. Mediums Covered - Surfacing, Polygon Modelling, VR, Pipeline management
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      Transcript

      PHIL BOTLEY: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming to this future of product design, industrial design tools. I'm going to stand here, James. You'd like to sit there? So I can do my esteemed guest. It's going to be an interesting session.

      I wasn't too sure how to run a roundtable. Last time I ran one was three years ago, in another AU. So I kind of thought I'd just run it in a kind of a Q&A session. Those of you who've seen Top Gear, you've got three lads sitting around talking about cars. We're just going to sit around and talk about all things industrial design; machine learning, UI, and everything. Hopefully you'll find it interesting. We've got the brains trust here. We were going to have a customer, but unfortunately Mark couldn't make it. So last minute, James stepped in to fill the breach.

      Usual safe harbor statements. We might talk about stuff which may or may not appear in bits of our software. In the roadmap, you've seen this all day in our presentations. First of all, introductions. And I'll go last, I'll let my guests go first. Daniel?

      DANIEL: Yeah. So hi, everybody. My name is Daniel. I've been with Autodesk for seven years. I live in Germany, user of Alias for 10 years. And my job at Autodesk is to work with customers directly to help them on board of Alias, or move Alias, or shock grid, reroute it into different parts of the automotive world. That's primarily what I do.

      PHIL BOTLEY: What about some of your background, Dan?

      DANIEL: Yeah, sorry. My background-- so before I moved to Autodesk, I was in agency work in Germany. Used Alias, used Inventor, also used Cinema 4D, Maya. So a bit of a generalist. And I worked directly with the automotive studios for the movies which went on the big screens at the automotive shops. Yeah.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And he's doing some good stuff with Midjourney at the moment, aren't you?

      DANIEL: Doing some AI stuff.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Doing some AI stuff, which I think crops up there. Thank you. That's guest number one. Guest number two, Mr. Cronin.

      JAMES CRONIN: So yeah, I'm James Cronin. I've been with Autodesk for 10 years. My current role, or current title, even though I've been doing pretty much the same thing the whole time I've been here is Senior Business Development Executive. But really, I'm just the subject matter expert for Alias and VRED, supporting the North America auto sales teams. My background before Autodesk, I was at Nissan Design America for 11 years as a concept modeler, class-A servicer, viz lead.

      And then before that, I worked for a small Canadian company called Alias Wavefront.

      [LAUGHTER]

      So, I kind of made the full circle.

      DANIEL: So how long have you used Alias for, then?

      JAMES CRONIN: Since version 5.

      DANIEL: Oh, version 5.

      JAMES CRONIN: So in the early 90's, mid-90's? Yeah. So it's been a bit.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And what about the CCS stuff, James, your work there?

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, so I went to CCS, so a lot of the people I graduated with are now in the industry as the car designers of the world, but I also spent some time teaching at CCS. I taught continuing ed classes to non-art students that wanted to get into the servicing world, and did some instruction of the regular design students, as well.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Nice. All right. Quite cool. So it's a good section, there. My name is Phil Botley. You might have seen me from yesterday, or some of my webinars, or whatever. I'm the Alias Product Manager. I've been doing this since 1996. Not Alias, product management using Alias, so nearly as long as Mr. Cronin, here.

      All I've done in my life is really working-- servicing automotive, whether it be for [INAUDIBLE] or Autodesk. So, I'm kind of very niche and very focused on this. And basically, I look after everything that's Alias related, whether that be the surfacing tools, [INAUDIBLE] machine learning, PDM, blah blah blah.

      So anything that we're doing in the content creation space, that's kind of my remit. So this is really exciting for us, and if you pay attention to some of the stuff we're saying, you'll get an idea of the direction that the tools are going in without giving too much away from a roadmap perspective. And so we're going to rattle through this quite quickly, and it will have Q&A at the end. There's a microphone there.

      I'm going to kind of compare this and sort of keep these guys on topic. You see, they have a tendency to talk for a long time. They do, they do, they do. And what I've done, I've really split it into a number of sections to keep it on a narrow track. We're going to look at areas of technology, how are changes in technology influencing how we design, how we work with design tools, how we collaborate, also. What does this mean from a creativity perspective, how can we create, or how could these tools actually hinder our creation?

      Will they make us better designers, or worse designers? How do we collaborate, and how much collaboration is too much collaboration? We're talking so much and we're communicating, we don't get the work done. And then also discoverability, the concept of user walk up usability, how do we get that in the software?

      And then, of course, the thing about education. My old university, came best product design course in the UK. It's quite cool. So, the University is really important for getting the next gen of users, and how do we manage that, and critically, to James's point, work with that? From my perspective, we're doing stuff with Coventry and other universities to transfer that knowledge, but how do you continue that? And then, society and the future. So hopefully this will give you a maybe 45 minutes-- an interesting talk track, and some interesting discussions with my colleagues here.

      So first of all, technologies. And we all know about machine learning, right? And it's a topic at the moment. But I've talked with many customers who've been doing this for 18 months or 24 months now with Alias, with customers having machine-learning workshops, running prototypes. And the one question that comes up is, this the end of the creative? In the sense that this-- will the software design for me, so there's an Alias model, or I can just press a button and the software works? Or will it just be another tool in the toolkit for a designer, like the square tool, or my painting tools, or my visualization tools.

      JAMES CRONIN: I think it'll be another tool. In the past, during a design selection phase, senior management might literally just cut the front end of one sketch and put it on another and say, this is the direction we're going through, figure out what happens between the front and the back. And I think now, maybe moving forward, that will be an easier task to just grab sketches, maybe using AI to force them together. Or maybe, we like the aesthetic or the front end that you drew, but we like the body side that you drew, what if you could have that happen with technology?

      PHIL BOTLEY: So the ability to kind of extract the area that you like and apply it to the model that you're working on. So it becomes like an intelligent paintbrush, with knowledge, and sort of design-- style-aware, a style-aware paintbrushing effect.

      JAMES CRONIN: And then get to those-- get to what senior management or the directors want without having to wait four weeks. Yeah, they really like this and this, and that's-- you can have it by tomorrow.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah. And of course, the logical extension to that is that instead of actually waiting weeks for iterations, you can do more iterations and get more designs [INAUDIBLE] your design, which is obviously a key benefit. Dan, what do you think from your Perspective

      DANIEL: I mean, I also agree. But also, with AI specifically, when you have something designing for you, is that even your design? How do you monetise what's been made? Because basically the AI, you just take in everything in the world and then compiling something. So is it like copying, when it does so? I see it more as, it helps you move, here's another tool that's designed, rather than it doing it for you. I can't see, short-term, that being OK.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Well, I mean that's an interesting point you make. So I mean my wife is a patent-- patent director, patent partner, sorry. And one of her colleagues works in machine learning, and she says, it's the wild west at the moment. This whole concept of, if you make something based on or an inference based on someone else's design, who owns the copyright? Is it us because we've created the tools, is it the designer who's created that? When artists paint paintings, who owns that? Is it the people who make the paints, or is it the artist themselves?

      I think it's going to be really interesting how you license that, and that could be a new license model, right? If your software is helping design, that could be really quite an interesting topic. And so the consensus is it is just going to become another tool. We're not going to make designers redundant. It's just going to exist like other tools.

      [AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

      DANIEL: I can't see everything looking the same, because that's basically what it could be if you just carry on-- you keep training it and then they'll just produce the same stuff over and over again. So yeah, no, I'd say it's another tool.

      PHIL BOTLEY: So why do wheel arches look the same? We built a particular way with Alias. [LAUGHING] Right, exactly. But it is an interesting point, right. So, I mean-- and this is really-- this really opens up from our perspective, and I'll kind of give an Alias flavor to this sort of stuff to give you an insight into our thinking, from research and development.

      We see this as really opening the page for a style-aware tool. So if you kind of understand, to James's point, what this model does and how it exists, and this model, you can really blend the two together, and you can-- I don't mean fusion in the software sense, but you can really merge the two and begin to extract data, and really convert that design know-how into reusable data across your design teams. So I think this really opens the door, and I'm with the guys on this, it opens the door to another tool, but actually a very powerful tool for design teams moving forward.

      Which leads us into this question, right? This is some of Dan's work, here, that he's been working on. Could it make us better designers? Could it augment our creativity? Or are we still reliant on our own natural sketching, 3D thinking, modeling skills.

      JAMES CRONIN: Hopefully, it would allow you to see what not to do faster. A lot of what we do as concept modelers is, we might turn to the designer and say, are you sure you want to do this, and they say, well we got to show that this is not the right package to build this vehicle upon. It's like, great, so I have to build a whole model as best as possible to show that this is not right. It's not a fun thing to model. But I think maybe when there's things like this you can get to those decisions, that these are the things not to do, sooner.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah, OK. So it's kind of ruling out the bad directions to take, and ensuring you go down the right paths.

      DANIEL: Totally agree, nothing to add there. Yeah.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Nothing to add there. But in the sense of actually making us better designers, do you think it can actually help us be more creative?

      DANIEL: Yeah. No, I do, yeah. I presented this yesterday, and I think you said before, it's another tool. But when you explore anything in the real world, at least for some people, they might not even have the opportunity to look anywhere else than what-- where they can look at, wherever they're located around the world. So they might not have-- if you're doing, for example, furniture and you want to just go and have a look in nature and get some inspiration, maybe they don't have the opportunity to do that.

      Just use AI. Just make that-- or for you then to use what you couldn't see in the real world. Then you can just make it. So yes, then they can find inspiration, and that could make you a better designer. I don't know if it's better, but it gives you more opportunity.

      PHIL BOTLEY: I think that's interesting, because if you think about-- would that mean that it can make non-designers, designers, if you could give them a special tool? Not that we kind of-- sorry for engineers in the room here-- not that we want engineers to dig in to do design, like we don't want to do engineering.

      But it's an interesting concept, isn't it? And the whole concept of, you've got your mood boards there, and we look at this in a 2D way, but if we could somehow, as you say, make those influences work in a 3D environment, it does by definition make us a better-- allows us to make better designs by converting what might stay in a 2D space into 3D very easily, very quickly.

      OK, so the consensus is we will make better designers, that's quite cool. Another topic linked to that, and this is one of my-- no disrespect to you, [INAUDIBLE] our Dynamo guru by the way, from Alias. When we go around to customers, we find that we spend a lot of time doing automations, and in some cases, these actually do speed up the design process. But you know, sometimes when you've got an embarrassment of riches you're scratching your head going, oh no I don't know which one I like. It's like a kiddy in a sweet shop. I mean, do you think that that's a valid statement? Do they speed up the process, or are they a bit of a distraction? And could they actually be masking, right, good design-- sorry, bad design, or covering up bad design.

      JAMES CRONIN: I don't know, I think I'm going to sort of refer back to my previous point that sometimes we get these blinders on for the design, and we chase down a theme. Maybe in the 11th hour someone comes in and says, let's do square fog lights, and then all of a sudden it was like, oh that was it, we should have started with that to begin with. And now we're rushing to make this theme work before it gets put on a ship and sent over the ocean. But maybe with this-- I mean, I still think this is a way to, again, weed out and narrow down like, this is a great theme but this is a better version than the one we-- you know, before you spend too much time.

      PHIL BOTLEY: It's not a process, isn't it? It's having something to process using such a powerful tool in a way that it can guide you down a particular route and having those systems in place to model--

      JAMES CRONIN: Right.

      PHIL BOTLEY: --very quickly once you've had a-- once you've made a decision.

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, you can evaluate all the different what ifs--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yes.

      JAMES CRONIN: --and then keep yourself on the right path.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And I think that's the important thing, isn't it? It's the what ifs, the evaluation, and a longer timeline. And you can just freeze it, select it, and use that, and move it forward-- or work on that geometry. And that's a-- what's your take on that, Dan?

      DANIEL: I think the tools do speed up the design process. It's not just in Alias and surfacing. If you just look at any other tools which are on the market-- Fusion 360, obviously, and others alike. When you're automating a process, you're then giving yourself more time to do something else, which then can also lead to what you just said the discovery of, yeah, we need to change the shape of the lights--

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah.

      DANIEL: Because that will then give the opportunity to do that, to have that time. So, yeah, automation.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And I think there's two parts to it. So there's more time and-- I know, we always talk about this is, right? It's that we always give customers more time, but it still takes the same amount of time to get a car out. So I guess maybe that question is phrased incorrectly. It's not really speeding up the design process. It's kind of speeding up the design iteration process.

      DANIEL: Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah. If you've ever modeled a large project, you rush at the end trying to get all the PQ and all the fit and finish, and all the lead in dialed in just right. And maybe that now gives us more time to finesse the look and feel of that the stuff that requires the human that can't be, maybe, generally developed.

      PHIL BOTLEY: It's just the detail work, really, isn't it? The detail work to get it ready for engineering. [INAUDIBLE] OK.

      Now I just find it it's quite an interesting perspective. And this is something that we should-- been working on for a while, which is kind of linked into this, is that we model in software. And we're used to modeling in wireframe, or rendering, or-- for argument's sake, you see the car spinning around, the car is spinning around. Normally, we look around the car. We walk around the car.

      And so a big topic for us at the moment is real world paradigms. How can we replicate real world paradigms, such as ambiguity, which we'll look at in moment, and emotion in a modeling world. And I guess that's a question to you first, Dan. How can we begin to get emotion, first of all, back into modeling? And is it the right thing to do? Is it is it critical to us making better designs by having that emotion in a very cold, cut environment?

      DANIEL: I mean, if you look at-- you've got a car there. But if you have a look at design and why it was, I think there was an era before these tools started to come into light where there was a bit of a flat design phase. Like with cars, they all kind of started looking the same. And then in the last seven-- people run out of ideas or they had a different design direction.

      And in the last seven years, you can see cars, specifically cars, changing and becoming more-- what's the right word-- more emotional, more you can feel the surface. You can feel the same body, like it's changing. So, yes, I think when you talk about real world paradigms, sketching and exploring in a different way, if it's virtual reality or if it's walking around the car before it's made, of course, that's changing. And you can replicate at least some part of the real world. Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah. Designers and design staff have always tried new ways to experiment and bring emotion, whether it's welding a wireframe together, stretching fabric around it, you know like--

      [INTERPOSING VOICES]

      --Chris Bangle, work. Or for interior seating box, we'd build these foam core markups and just trying-- design is always tried to-- what other ways can we do what we're currently doing? This way is efficient. We know how to do it, but how can we look at it differently?

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: So there's just another, I think, switching into the virtual version is just another way to experience stuff. And maybe you weren't faster by doing it in the headset, maybe actually spend more time, but maybe you take the headset off, and you're happier and you're more confident where you went. But it didn't make anything faster--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: --but the experience and the emotion is now better connected.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah, we were at an automotive company last week, and we had that very point about wearing a headset. And one of the comments that kept on coming up was even when you're doing design reviews or even when you're sketching, you're disconnected because you can't see your colleagues, right? Because you've got this big headset on and [INAUDIBLE] may change that, and then [INAUDIBLE] may change that.

      But you kind of lose that affordance, you can't see Dan going, oh, my god, that sketch is appalling or whatever. Or, I don't like that. You miss those cues that inform your design and move you in certain directions. And I think this is something which we've overlooked for a long, long time in software, right? And I think it's really-- if we can get it back into it, whether it be on a screen or in an augmented reality setting, I think it could really open new ways of modeling, of course, but actually making decisions and getting emotion into reviews.

      If you've been lucky enough to stand around the clay and everyone's really emotional, and happy, and touching. And you smell it, and you touch it, and you feel it-- it's raw. You look at something on a power wall screen like this, it's just a flat image spinning around. So I think there's a long way to go with those sort of paradigms.

      Not impossible. I'm not saying we have smell-o-vision on your head, mounted display so you can smell the clay. But it's certainly an interesting trend.

      And this leads us nicely into XR. We've been talking about virtual reality for years, whether it be 1990s or the 2000s. But it's now at a stage where it's becoming ubiquitous. You can use it day in day out. Our software, you just put your headset on, you don't have to set it up, and you're in VR immediately.

      And I guess the question to you, James, is extended reality-- and for those that don't know, that's kind of augmented reality where you can merge the physical and the real. Do we think it's here? And do we think it's here to stay? And if so, how do we think it'll change how we design?

      JAMES CRONIN: So I do think it's here to stay. When we first introduced the VIVE and the Rift, when we were first showing VRED, the very first versions, I remember demoing it. A lot of times, I put the headset on people for the very first time. This was their first time to ever put on a headset, so they were more enamored with the VR. They would just be looking at the world, not the vehicle.

      So I think now most people have probably all-- everyone in here has probably worn a headset. But maybe six years ago, I'd say that and only a couple of people would raise their hands. So now, I think it is here to stay. And especially with younger designers and the demand to get into 3D earlier, being able to experience it in 3D as soon as possible is important for proportions.

      We had an intern at Autodesk a few summers ago, and he modeled up a car in Alias. And I looked at it on the screen and I immediately knew what was wrong with it. But I said, let's go into VR. And immediately, he saw everything because it was-- the wheels are too big, the fenders were too large.

      And then we came back a week later, and the proportions all looked better. So it's super useful, especially with everything that-- maybe we're going to talk on this in future slides. But the days of staying in 2D are much shorter than they used to be.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And I think that's the key thing, right? It's getting into 3D as quickly as possible, so you can make those informed decisions. And I remember a story from an OEM in the UK, where they were doing a similar exercise with cars. And this very cheeky designer decided to use a six percentile Chinese lady for the mannequin in the car. And so when it came to the reviews in VR, everyone was like, well, what's going on here.

      Proportions were lovely, absolutely lovely. But it wasn't designed for six foot German gentleman. But VR actually kind of-- it keeps you straight, right? It keeps you on the straight and narrow. You can't you can't hide from that.

      Dan, what's your take on that? And critically, how do you think it'll change how we design more importantly?

      DANIEL: Yeah, so just quickly before I answer. In the room, who is a designer? Just hands up. OK, so about 30% or 40%. And modeling? OK.

      JAMES CRONIN: They're all clumped together here.

      DANIEL: Right?

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah.

      DANIEL: So this gives me some context how to answer the question. So if you ask me this question six years ago, I think it would be totally different to how I'm answering today. So could it's day finally be dawning? And if so, will it change the way we design? The answer is yes.

      I mean, I can give a super simple example. It's not automotive, but it's-- at home, I had some space where I could build myself an office through the pandemic and also a bar, which is attached to it. But for me to see how it was going to be and designed the way, I could move my hand from one part of the bar to the other part of the bar, it was all done in XR and VR.

      PHIL BOTLEY: You modeled your bar in VR?

      DANIEL: In a day, I made the decisions, and then I was able to go to shop, then do all the woodwork, and then make it. And in a week, you know I had nothing, and then I used XR and VR to design it and make my decisions. So it's not it's not automotive, but I have a bar after I finished work. It's fantastic.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Can I ask which software you used?

      DANIEL: I used Maya and Alias.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Oh, [INAUDIBLE].

      DANIEL: Yeah, and VRED.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And VRED. I thought you were going to say Blender. [LAUGHS]

      DANIEL: No, no, no. No competitive tools.

      PHIL BOTLEY: [LAUGHS]

      DANIEL: No. [LAUGHS]

      PHIL BOTLEY: All right, so it's just a quick way-- it's a quick way of just designing and validating, isn't it?

      DANIEL: Validating. Validation, yeah. And the hardware is here now. And that's why I would have answered it differently because the hardware was just starting to be able to support this.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And, I guess, it's the cost as well. I mean, they're reasonably priced that the kit to use.

      DANIEL: The cost of entry of this is super low.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah. Easy to set up. And I think that-- And what you see there-- again, for those who maybe haven't seen this before-- this is this is from VRED. And this--

      DANIEL: This is crazy. That was streamed like to a mobile phone from the Wi-Fi inside the house to see what that car would look like.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      DANIEL: Absolutely crazy.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And so, yeah, so what you saw at the beginning of that film and-- again, we saw this last week with an automotive customer and we saw it at our AAF event in Germany a few months ago-- is you can have a real physical model, so physical car, then next to it you have a big space and then you have people in there augmented reality headsets on, so they can see the car. And they can see the virtual car.

      But, of course, they can do things to the virtual car that you can't do to the real car, like change the color in an instant or put different wing mirrors, on or different wheels, or different paints. Or, as we were talking before, where I'll lift the car up and see the airflow beneath. There's lots of stuff that you can do now, which will really-- as you say-- empower the designer and really make the designer better, I think.

      Here's the $64,000 question, right? Modeling technologies, what comes next? It's the system the icons from your deck down, subdivision--

      JAMES CRONIN: [INAUDIBLE] stole them.

      PHIL BOTLEY: I stole them. I thought they're really cool, though. I mean, technically, they're our icons.

      [LAUGHTER]

      DANIEL: They are.

      PHIL BOTLEY: But I'm kind of stealing them back from you. So you've got the [INAUDIBLE], surfaces, and the Dynamo toolbox. But we always think that we're on the cusp of-- or we reached the pinnacle of design, then [INAUDIBLE] comes, then machine learning comes, then generative comes, and then-- I don't know-- whatever is beyond. So what do we think is next from a geometrical modeling perspective?

      DANIEL: I would hope painting the surfaces would be the next thing to come, so trying-- just knock out some curves and then the geometry is automatically starting to come to light as you're going through the process of designing. That's painting, basically, directly--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Painting onto the?

      DANIEL: Art directly onto the surface.

      PHIL BOTLEY: It's like painting, painting, painting the shape, painting the features.

      DANIEL: Yeah, so using just curves and then some smart AI, which understands the depth, the angle you need, et cetera. So I want it to help me get to that process quicker or get to the end result quicker. That's what I would-- I don't know when that is. I don't know.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And that's not a leading question. I didn't--

      DANIEL: We haven't done any rehearsal on this.

      PHIL BOTLEY: I wanted to keep it freestyle, but-- and that's a great point. And again, dovetails into some of the work that we're doing. And that's where we think the future is in terms of painting geometry. And machine learning is really important for that. Because if we understand the nature of a surface and we understand the nature of a patch plan or components, then we can actually begin to see how we build it.

      And if we can begin to see how we can build it, we can create tools that can build it automatically. So conceivably, in some of our thinking, we have a situation where, say, I'm doing a Class A surface reverse engineering, for maybe non-automotive people, and I want to surface it, I can begin to paint on it. But I can do more than that.

      If I want to make it paint the way Dan paints, I can select my Dan paintbrush. And because it knows how Dan surfaces, it actually paints and makes the geometry in a Dan way. He wants to do it like James, then I can pick the James paintbrush, then it paints it with James. You want to do it like me and create a real mess, then we'll pick my paint brush.

      But this is where painting, I think, really becomes really important, a bit like XR. The technology is there, the know how is there, and we can actually convert those into tools that we can actually use in the process.

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, I'd like to see ease of use, obviously. I think everyone would like to see stuff just being easier. And then maybe machine learning to track my style. So that marking menus are fast. We all know how quick they can be.

      But it would be-- it'd be a lot-- I mean, in a perfect world, it just knows where you're heading, you know? And it's like as you start to maybe intersect the surface into another surface, maybe it can think ahead and be like, oh, maybe I should just drop you some tangents on the body side where I think you're going to blend between. And those are already starting to appear.

      PHIL BOTLEY: It's like the Volvo car when you're falling asleep, it beeps or it tells you if you've had too much beer [INAUDIBLE].

      [LAUGHTER]

      Or, maybe not. But that's, again, that's an interesting point. And this goes to an interesting conversation, which we're talking internally in development at the moment about how can software-- and I'm not talking about Microsoft paperclip here that tells you how it works-- how can software help you and guide you, and how can it how can it predict what you're doing, and then either present some options to you or actually make the geometry for you. And say, James, I think you're doing this, I suggest this, this, and this.

      And this, really, if you think of modern software-- Alias is an example-- you model, then you do your analysis, and then you see what the result is, and then you actually go and correct the model to fix the results. But what if this was running in the background all the time. What if the analysis tool-- what if it became evaluation-based design?

      And I think we're going to see a lot more of this moving forward-- based not just around machine learning, but based around intelligent applications. There's a combination both of geometrical painting-- geometry painting, sorry, but also kind of some guidance in terms of how you model and best practice, which also goes to your point about discoverability, right? Because that means if you're just straight out of college, you can be up to speed very quickly because you've got a catalog of standards that a company has and Alias is helping you or any software helping you use that.

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, because if anyone's taught Alias or any 3D software, a lot of it is telling people what the next button click is, and they freeze, and they won't move beyond that point until you tell them pick nothing, and then they, oh, right.

      DANIEL: Who is an Alias user?

      JAMES CRONIN: Who uses Alias? Who was taught Alias?

      DANIEL: Oh, OK.

      JAMES CRONIN: Or, taught any software, right? And you have to go around the room, you're managing all these students, and you keep coming back to the one person who keeps freezing and won't go beyond the next button click. They just want you to tell them it's OK to project that onto the side. So if the software could be--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yes.

      JAMES CRONIN: --moving them along would be nice.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And I think that's also part of our job, as software developers. We need to make software more approachable and accessible. It can be quite austere, quite scary, quite daunting. If I press that, will my model blow up or will it crash? I don't want to do that. I get frightened of it. So it's our job to really focus on the experience and make it inviting. I think that's a--

      DANIEL: About 15 minutes?

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one. So, sorry, I knew this would go on longer than planned. So collaboration and platforms. I'll rattle through.

      So and again, this is not sci-fi. This is our RED tool, collaborative design. Really, really good, by the way. It kind of came into its own during the pandemic, where we were running design reviews globally. I guess really for James, the future of collaboration for industrial design, and what does it look like?

      I mean, we're not talking full on RED with avatars. It could be something as simple as sharing sketches or sharing annotations. From an ID perspective, what does it look like?

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, I mean, I think maybe sharing in whichever software you're in, so that I should be able to be in VR and you're in Photoshop, and maybe there's better-- so it's not just software A and software A collaboration, it's actually the software side of independent of the collaboration--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: --would maybe be one way.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Which kind of goes to your point, you were saying before, Dan, about data being maybe quite important here. Sharing the data, so everyone's looking at the same data at the same time. And if you're looking at the same data and you're looking at the same model, then collaboration is a lot easier. You can just send virtual post-it notes or whatever.

      DANIEL: Exactly it. I mean just to reinforce what you said, I think pipeline should be you shouldn't be bound to the software you're using to discover together what you're doing. So collaboration in the future, I mean, I hope whatever tool you go into, you can just bring your data in, and then you can do your review, and/or or make mark-ups, annotations--

      JAMES CRONIN: And always, I think the future is always accessible all the time. Right now, this experience one or two people had to pause, prep it.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yes.

      JAMES CRONIN: And then in the past, you know everyone left from home, and the design director would walk in the back, and be able to stare at that clay model for 2 hours by himself, and get his knife out and start putting some knife lines and some tape lines. You come in the next morning, you're like, what the heck happened?

      But this is the future of this vehicle, and now that can all be-- that doesn't exist. The clay model is not back there. It's on someone's computer, turned off. And there should be a consistent--

      PHIL BOTLEY: But, again, I think that's an interesting point. And I know we need to rush. But there's an interesting point, though. Because when you're modeling-- and I don't know about you-- Alias modelers here-- when I'm modeling with Alias, sometimes I don't want to actually let the model go. I don't want to let anyone see it until it's finished.

      Whereas with the clay, you can't have that. Because it's a physical property. It's there. You can't hide it. So I wonder if the software is kind of holding you back. And you have to force people to actually every night or in real time stream it to a screen that has a live update of the model.

      JAMES CRONIN: And I'm sure there's some modelers out there that may be slow, pump the brakes, so they didn't have to make changes from a designer's direction.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah, I'd say an anecdote about that later on, which is quite interesting. Links in to this, this is a point again you made before about data, Dan, right? We talk about the verse. We saw it today-- the various verses. If it's right and the collaboration works that's fine, but we don't want it to really become a space just to store data because that's pretty useless, right?

      It's just like a filing cabinets or your C drive. Is that a correct statement? It has to be a proper, true space for collaboration as opposed to repository.

      DANIEL: Yeah, I agree.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And that really unlocks kind of the previous slide, isn't it?

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, I think the mindset of the industrial design or product design might change to you're no longer saving files, you're just developing something, right? So it's no longer about individual files, making sure they're in the right location, there's just there's this constant collaborative data that's just evolving.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah, it's kind of a living object. And everyone's contributing to it, and everyone's moving forward. I guess we can skip over this. This is a PDM one. This is just me just kind of getting some requirements moving forward.

      Here's the interesting one that I was thinking about. How do we get the collaborative balance correct? For example, case in point, so I'm doing AU sessions all yesterday and today, in meetings and everything. Go on my phone, it's like not emails, but, mate, 147 WhatsApps or something.

      And I don't read them all. I don't have time to read them all. But if you're in there and you've got your WhatsApp version on your screen, and you're modeling and you have to answer it, how do you discipline it? Or, is there a mechanism to stop that or should there be a mechanism to limit that? Or, will people actually just keep on messaging and not do any work?

      JAMES CRONIN: Well, I think making that single source of truth, that single place where the collaboration happens is important and making that the easiest, so that people stop choosing what they find easier. They realize the benefit of everything being in one central location.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yes.

      DANIEL: Then you choose when you go there.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Then you choose?

      DANIEL: You choose when you go there, yeah. You've got a lot of friends? 145 messages? It's like--

      PHIL BOTLEY: [LAUGHS] They just talk nonsense, right? It's just-- total nonsense. They're swapping pictures of watches. Really?

      DANIEL: But to your question, you have to do the balance yourself. It's like working from home. How many Zoom or Teams calls.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Just discipline, right? Your own discipline.

      DANIEL: Your own discipline. Right now, I don't know how to answer that differently. Don't know.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Oh, no, it's got me. I was just thinking we're talking about it internally about do we put internal messaging inside our software. And if so, how do we switch it off or control it and stop people getting distracted? We all have Teams and Slack, and you just switch it off, but just keeps on coming in it's incessant.

      DANIEL: Yeah.

      PHIL BOTLEY: It's quite painful. All right. Discoverability and creativity. This is really interesting. And this goes to a point we made before. If you look at a model, the model is a physical entity on the screen. And there's no ambiguity. If you've seen it-- when you sketch, the objective is sketch is to convey emotion, to get your boss to sign it off, and to actually draw your eye to an area of interest, whether it be the wheel, the light can, or whatever.

      But we don't really have that in a modeling environment. We see the whole car, the front, the side, the back, the wheels. And our thinking is-- or we kind of think can ambiguity help us make better and more informed design decisions? And effectively, can we actually-- to the original point I made about get emotion back into design-- so by making models more ambiguous in the software?

      JAMES CRONIN: I think that's-- well, I think, that's very important. Because a lot of times, I feel that designers don't want to go to 3D because they like the ambiguity of their sketch.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yes.

      JAMES CRONIN: Because then everyone sees it differently. And maybe they draw something out of this ethereal drawing. If they'd rushed it into 3D, it might have been looked over, and maybe something that they didn't see that someone else saw in it. So I think having that is important for early concept--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Early concept.

      JAMES CRONIN: --is letting everyone see the sketch or the design for what they think it is. Oh, I think a--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Which kind of suggests different types of geometry creation tools and interaction paradigms perhaps to actually do that, like create in VR, where you can make it look like a cartoon effectively from those shadings and renderings. What do you think, Dan? Anything?

      DANIEL: Nothing to add.

      PHIL BOTLEY: I think Saturday, you're very quiet. Another one here, mate. They're really important. OK, so we've been on many calls, especially during lockdown, with design directors. And one of their number one requests is making mistakes-- allow software to make mistakes.

      So when we make something-- and this is the point we had before about we have an infinite number of patterns, and that's really good. I really do believe that can make better designs and better decisions. But sometimes, some of the best ideas come from mistakes. Maybe sometimes, software doesn't let us make mistakes.

      And what I'm proposing here is if we allow our tools to make mistakes, will it help us? Will it open different paths that perhaps weren't open for us in a digital world? And if so, how do we allow software to make mistakes, given this software is by the numbers and mathematically not likely to make mistakes?

      JAMES CRONIN: And I think, at least, I utilize a lot of tools in Alias that makes mistakes is actually part of my way I work, right? There are some tools that can't build some surfaces. But you use them in a way that it spits out something that you then-- and if the tool just didn't give me any results, and I was not able to use it for the pieces I wanted, I wouldn't maybe not have been able to create the shape that I wanted to create. So I think you have to allow the-- because you don't know what the next person wants to build, right? So yeah, so don't-- you can't make tools that just do this because you don't know what-- you don't know what this is for your customer.

      DANIEL: Yeah. And it was something. I mean, it's a bit feature-y, but the history visualizer, I would recommend anybody who's using Alias to check it out. But before then, using history, it was pretty difficult to explore even with the history you have all the way through creating a surface.

      If you change one thing, it would just not do it for you. It would just fail the whole thing-- but today, in Alias, it tells you where you failed and what new input you need to put in, so you're able to quickly with them mistakes of the history, it's not telling you, no, you can't do that. It's more like, OK, this is what you've done wrong, go in, and maybe explore.

      It allows your mind to go, OK, I'll just do it a little bit differently. I'll drop a different curve in there or bring some different data in. So, yeah.

      PHIL BOTLEY: OK, so-- yeah, I think what we're thinking there is something a bit more iterative than in history visualizer or other tools work.

      DANIEL: And that's what I mean, it's a bit feature-y, but you're able to really iterate quick because you're not having to do-- because it's telling you, it's allowing you to make the mistake and before it couldn't do that.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah. No, it's an interesting point, something we're looking at. And this is, to your point before, James, right? How can we quickly get people productive with tools, yet critically retain that walk-up knowledge in the future? And I think that's really important for a number of reasons.

      Alias is-- and all software is complicated by its very nature. And what we find is that people might want to use it maybe for half an hour a week just to bang in some surfaces or do some geometry, and we employed this approach in our Create VR Immersive Modeling Tool, which worked really well.

      But from that perspective, what are some of the attributes that a software has to have to ensure easy, quick productivity, but also retaining that knowledge? If you don't use it for six months, how can you retain that knowledge, but also make it a very clever tool?

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, it is important, like if it's a tool that it's your everyday tool, maybe having the need to relearn it is not so important. But if you're only opening a product once a month--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yes.

      JAMES CRONIN: --it has to be self discoverable to the point that maybe it never needed-- you don't need training in the first place, right? So that's my thought. If a software-- if someone only is going to use it once a month, and they should be able to teach themselves how to do it every single time because they might have forgotten it, right?

      It's like video games, right? Video games don't give you a bunch of instructions and then tell you how to play the game, right? You learn how to use it over time until you maybe don't realize what you're doing, but you've been taught.

      PHIL BOTLEY: We don't need to design something that you can retain. It's easy to understand as soon as you open it. And it's intuitive to--

      JAMES CRONIN: --pick it back up, right? So, yeah, that game you might have spent 30 hours learning, two months from now, you can pick it up, and immediately, you'd know exactly what to do, right?

      PHIL BOTLEY: It's like riding a bike. Yeah. OK, that's interesting. I mean, it's an interesting point because we're on this project at the moment with Alias where we're straddling these two paths of non-expert users, and casual users, and also expert users. So I think a lot of interesting facts, which kind of lead into to some of those moving forward.

      Again, this is you pick this up before, James, about this software that would guide you as an Alias user or any user. And I think we know the answer to this question. The question I proposed was how can we assist a modeler with downstream engineering when you're modeling? And I you said the point-- you make the point that if Alias gave you suggestions as what to do or any software, that would be of benefit. And this is kind of-- you've answered our question before.

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, like persistent model check, right? At the very beginning, you sort of say, well, this part needs to be this draft and this minimum radius, and you start doing stuff and maybe it starts pointing out. So you don't have to run the model check tool, it's just constantly, maybe, just flagging stuff. And you can say, don't care this time, right?

      PHIL BOTLEY: It's kind of running in the background. It's like a virtual assistant, right?

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Always helping and working you. And then finally, our biggest question. Ultimately, did digital tools stifle creativity or unlock it? I mean that's a-- we talk with many designers.

      They sketch, they don't use digital when they're modeling cars. They have a cast guide to work with them. And they say that they feel constrained by 3D digital modeling tools. And other people say it unlocks them because they begin to explore with the tools and create things. What do we think?

      DANIEL: I mean, I'll take a dab at that. So, again, it's the same thing-- if you asked me 10 years ago, my answer will be completely different today. And I don't know who is a auto designer here or if you just in products and industrial design. But now that people can access the technology kind of like a walk up and use it, you don't need to be a Class A surfacing guy just to jump into Alias and use it.

      You've got other technology there. It's unlocking the possibility to change your ideas on the fly. Because you spoke about collaboration is good, like you've got designer, you've got [INAUDIBLE] who work together. But the designer has more opportunity just to go in and try for himself, as well.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      DANIEL: So do digital tools stifle creativity? No, they definitely unlock it.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah, for sure.

      JAMES CRONIN: Because, I mean, in the past, you had to be able to draw a car--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yes.

      JAMES CRONIN: --from scratch. And all the proportions were great. I bet a good chunk of the new designers or new students are blocking in a 3D model, tumbling in it, and then using that as an underlay. So just like starting with a 3D to get proportions right, because then they can focus on design and not be focusing too much on--

      DANIEL: That is a workflow, like make just a rough shape, and then get your camera angles, and then bring it, just take a screenshot, bring that into Photoshop, do your work, then work with the cast modeler. It can be something that's so simple like that. But that is being used today.

      PHIL BOTLEY: It's actually making you-- it's unlocking creativity.

      DANIEL: Absolutely.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah, it is unlocking creativity and making people who are maybe not 3D conversant easy to model in 3D. The final stretch now, guys. So it's really important also what will the designers expect tomorrow? Simple fast sketch or all of the above? We know what our kids are like, right?

      It's TikTok. It's instantaneous, instant gratification. They can't watch Netflix for more than 5 minutes because they've got to change to a different film. What do we think the designers of tomorrow will want from a software? Will they want that speed, that instantaneous model gratification?

      DANIEL: I think they want it to just be approachable.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Approachable?

      DANIEL: Approachable. You can just go into any software, and you kind of know what you're doing already. So you can approach software, and use it immediately, and expects that whatever software you use, you can ingest whatever data you have.

      PHIL BOTLEY: So not really know how it works, but know how to make it work, like that the concept of data. You can be using any app and any data. You don't need to understand it, like your app on your phone.

      DANIEL: Exactly.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: And so part of that-- apps, phones, I think a lot of it is adding experience into the design process, right? Because there are studios I've been into-- if the interior doesn't have an experience tied to it, it doesn't matter how good it looks, it's not moving forward. The story, the experience has to be also part of the design.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: Where maybe it was in the past, it was more about does it look cool?

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: You know.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And that's a good point. And, again, just to kind of a flavor of some of the stuff we're doing also in that is that we find that experiential modeling is becoming more important in our industrial design and automotive stylists. And it's beyond geometry.

      And we're not too sure what it is yet. We can't touch it. But the whole concept of making an experiential-based modeling tool for when we're modeling interiors and adding different levels of information-- not just geometrical modeling or color and trim. That's something which we'll be getting to work on.

      And relevant from what we've just had in the pandemic and lockdown, how will we work, right? What do we think? Is a hybrid? And the thing that we found with us and all creatives is not being together has kind of stifled creativity a little bit-- white boarding, whites of eyes, coding, around the clay, et cetera. How do we think people will work in the future?

      JAMES CRONIN: I mean, I think it'll be more of a hybrid, but maybe the in-person will be more-- maybe they can, for design, can be more experiential things. Instead of just going to the office and trying to come up with a design in the same white fluorescent light room you've been in for the past six months, maybe everyone will work from home, and they say, all right, the next design sprint, we're going to go to Boulder.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Someone else's house.

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, yeah. Someone else's house. Yeah. Or, just maybe it will allow for more of that. And then, there's many studios that have been doing a lot of the surfacing and advanced modeling from home office for years. With remote staff or maybe even some of the smaller startup companies, none of their digital staff is in California. They're all using contractors from around the world.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      JAMES CRONIN: I think it'll be a hybrid.

      PHIL BOTLEY: OK, so maybe it's not as big a question as we thought. Final one, industrial and product design courses, the future of them and how do we grow them? I know we're just doing stuff with CCS, where I'm doing stuff for Coventry, and stuff with [INAUDIBLE]. I think it's really important that we get more involved in the ID and PD courses, in terms of whether it be doing lecturing, or tutoring, or-- and I think the hybrid, the virtual approach can help that-- and getting away from automotive, right?

      JAMES CRONIN: Yeah, the access to digital resources online has its positives and negatives. I was at CCS and a student work was playing on the big screen. I was like, that animation is amazing. The instructor was like, three of the students have the same exact animation.

      They downloaded it online and put their vehicle in it. So at first, I was blown away. But then when I learned that this was just an off-the-shelf template scene, I was very sort of like, oh, that's kind of disappointing that they didn't-- I would rather seen their own work versus just putting their stuff in a template.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah. And what's your take, Dan, from an ID and product design?

      DANIEL: The future-- I don't-- you speak about online content. That's a really good example with taking the animation. And you see so many things which are being copied now. Yeah, I did this. It only took me like a day.

      We need to get on site. We need to get-- I think remote is fine. And to your slide before, I was just thinking this hybrid approach is super cool because you can get to access more people from different parts of the world, which they might not have had the opportunity before. But for something like this, I think if I didn't go to school and I just learned everything from YouTube-- I don't know-- I think I'll be a completely different--

      PHIL BOTLEY: You could be very rich. You could repost to your YouTube.

      DANIEL: I could. I could repost them. No, just, I think, going on site, getting people involved, I think you're doing great work right now with allowing people, like the Alias learning version, which will be coming out soon. It's giving people access to the software. Yeah.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah. I only put it up there-- it's just a final slide. I mean, it's just-- it won't go into this, but this is learning today. Tomorrow, YouTube is really quite relevant. So really the future-- so we're wrapping up here now.

      So three opinions. And I wasn't too sure what to do with this. And I just thought a 64,000 foot overview, a statement, a blue sky statement of where you think you'd like to see the future of industrial design tools, Dan. Anything's possible. Imagine [INAUDIBLE] has got 200 developers, what would you like him to do?

      DANIEL: If I was going back into industry--

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah.

      DANIEL: --I would like to be able to use whatever I wanted. And wherever that data went, I could re-use that data. So it's not stopping me, just using one piece of software. That's what I would like.

      If I went back to industry, it doesn't matter what I pick, it feels the same in terms of you know what that data is when it's coming in. I'll go into a Alias and do all my fancy servicing. But then if I take it out and take it somewhere else, I want the data to feel the same.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Gotcha.

      DANIEL: Yeah. So that's where I see it.

      JAMES CRONIN: I see. I mean, I guess--

      DANIEL: There's many softwares, right?

      JAMES CRONIN: I see this is sort of a hybrid of a lot of the stuff we've talked about today. So maybe people that don't have that slick hand to be able to draw the cool car can come in and using sliders, and their voice, and their ideas can have things developed. And the people that are more hands on have easier ways of not fighting, not being stuck in this corner of like I can't get these three surfaces to build what do I do and then that stops them. So I see it as like a lot of what we covered. All of it is what I would hope to see in the future because I think we need all of the things we sort of talked about.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Yeah. And I think that's my point of view also. All the things we talked about and more developers [INAUDIBLE] to actually make it happen, I think. But I think that's-- yeah, I think everything-- it's components. But I think critically you're nail on the head there with Dan with data, right?

      That data moving into any product, being able to work on that data, regardless, not having to learn the software. It's easy to use. It's very enjoyable to use. And it thinks and works the way I work. I think that's really-- I think that's really where I would like to aim for. And I think that's where we are aiming for with [INAUDIBLE].

      And with that-- sorry, I've run over. I do apologize for that. I can talk for hours. Thank you very much, my friends. Much appreciated. Are there any questions for or guests or for me, even, about what you've seen today or any thoughts, any ideas, any observations, any insights--

      JAMES CRONIN: Disagreements?

      PHIL BOTLEY: Disagreements, even, yes.

      DANIEL: You want to use mic?

      PHIL BOTLEY: There's a microphone over there.

      DANIEL: Because-- the recording-- because it'll be recording.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIEL: No, it's because of the recording.

      AUDIENCE: Gotta get it up.

      PHIL BOTLEY: You can just hold it like a rock star.

      AUDIENCE: So like this? OK. This is a question for Dan. If you say you want the data to travel and feel the same, do you mean, well, data can actually be the same mathematical. But if you're saying it shall feel the same, aren't you rather talking about on the software-- you're now on a different software, and you want the same way to modify the data?

      DANIEL: No, so that's a good question. So question is, do I want the same tools in every software? That's kind of your question, right? No. So whatever software you go into, you can access the data like you did before. So the way it's layered, the shaders, it should just be you move between them and you know where the data is in your scene tree or in your object lister.

      Yeah, that's what I meant by that. So, obviously, we're all professionals. We all have our specialist software. We wouldn't be professionals if we weren't good at it. But I still want to be able to move to somewhere else and I know where to go to try and do my solid modeling, for example, in another piece of software.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] and now again.

      DANIEL: For example-- for example, yeah. So you could use the Blender workflow, for sure. A lot of software's open source or go in open source. And why not? Just try it and see how it works. But I want to know that if I export that data, and go somewhere else, I can carry on and do my job. Yeah.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] what I was trying to ask you. Because I know you did Blender [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIEL: Yeah.

      AUDIENCE: That's what I want [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIEL: Yeah.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Like a persistent seam graph, I guess, across all the products.

      JAMES CRONIN: It sounds easy.

      DANIEL: It sounds easy. But--

      JAMES CRONIN: It's like the Babel fish for data, just the software. File goes in, it comes out, and it's ready for that product.

      PHIL BOTLEY: USD.

      DANIEL: But, yeah, but, I mean, the industry is going in the right way. Yeah.

      AUDIENCE: But that's exactly where like media and entertainment is at now with Omniverse, and so on, USD. I just saw a presentation this morning where in Omniverse, they had this AI that could take an image of a car and build a car that's drivable immediately, like you can drive around in the Omniverse with it. And that, for me, also opens up the question-- and I asked the same kind of thing to them-- there's an obvious overlap between what we do at Autodesk, which toolsets we build and then which toolsets other verses build-- Omniverse or metaverse and whatnot. Where would you think you draw the line in terms of which toolsets should be inside-- let's say Alias, for example, and where do we say, no, OK, that's enough AI or enough automation.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Everyone's looking at me. It's a great question. And I think that goes to the nub of the issue, that the nature of how we define software is changing. And the nature of what we do about licensing and modeling is changing.

      DANIEL: Yes, monetization of what you do, like what does that mean.

      PHIL BOTLEY: And I think if we think of our software as monolithic apps or pieces of on-premise software, we're kind of looking backwards. And we need to really embrace this idea of componentization, this breaks this idea of data containers, being able to mix and match. So I don't have an exact answer for that. But I think if we reframe how we look at software and move away from monolithic vertical apps into components or capabilities, then everyone can play well together.

      And conceptually, now it's at the Omniverse presentation, also, you can imagine a situation where you're in this verse, this metaverse, Omniverse, call it what you will. And then, Dan's modeled his component, his data's in there, and he needs to do some wor-- James is going to do some work on it and needs to actually do a CFD analysis. Well, what does he do? Well, he goes to the store, and uses CFD 1 or CFD 2 from a certain OEM and works on that data, regardless.

      And I think that's the way it's beginning to change the concept of platforms, and apps, and data-- this concept of a digital thread going along the whole journey, and different apps at different stages using it. And I think that's also a key point. It can be non-linear. So you could use Alias very simply here to get the job done because it's the best tool for the job to get done quickly.

      But in a traditional process, it stops and goes into [INAUDIBLE], it might come back into Alias or goes into Fusion, then it goes away all the way to manufacturing. But what if you could use the best parts of Alias or Fusion in different parts of the process along this digital thread and you could use these components where applicable. And I think that's the revolution that is coming from these verses that are being built by everyone in a moment, these platforms.

      DANIEL: Just gonna ask the chap in the back, do we have time for one more question?

      AUDIENCE: You're a minute over.

      DANIEL: So is that yes or no?

      AUDIENCE: It's up to you, guys.

      DANIEL: OK, then sorry with the time. I guess, one more question--

      PHIL BOTLEY: If there's any more questions, absolutely, yes.

      DANIEL: Or, not. Yeah.

      PHIL BOTLEY: Or, not. [LAUGHS]

      DANIEL: That's OK. We're one minute over.

      PHIL BOTLEY: All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, guys.

      [APPLAUSE]