There are fundamental reasons that technical drawing isn’t replaceable. It can evolve though. The real barrier is that mental models, digital models, and the real world, are all in the same category: they’re all ‘environments’.
While drawing is something else entirely, not an environment. Far from it. Drawing is ‘equipment for looking at environments’, for close study.
Now, to say that 2 or more environments (mental, physical/real, digital) combined together (like in XR), is a replacement for ‘equipment for close study of environments’, just doesn’t make sense, even though it’s been said for decades now.
I propose instead an evolution in the equipment for looking — at, for close study of — any combination of environments. I have a website specifying the evolution of this equipment: https://tangerinefocus.com The equipment can be used with or without AR/XR.
I’m seeking interested professionals in AEC and any and all software companies who want to develop better equipment in their apps for close study of models. I give these ideas away for free. Anyone can use them. I’m available to help anyone design their implementations.
Visual Engagement with Modeled Worlds
TGN is a proposed OPEN FRAMEWORK for articulating VISUAL ATTENTIVE FOCUS within digital models of all kinds, put to work against the necessity for understanding that’s adequate to complex tasks in the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) and similar industries.
It’s an upgrade and revival of technical drawing, rethought, and brought back in models, empowering people to clarify and share their own expressions of visual attentive focus within models.
That’s what drawings do for mental models, right? TGN does the same for digital models.
TGN is equipment for LOOKING.
Just as drawing is for close study (of mental models), TGN is for close study of digital models.
The TGN rig shown above has 2 standard views built in as bookends, an ‘elevation’ view at one end, and a ‘plan’ view at the other end, of the TGN rig viewing path.
The demo shows simulation of some of the proposed features of the TGN OPEN FRAMEWORK for making things clear in models of all kinds. For description and specification of TGN, please continue to the website.
Technical drawing will break out of the form it’s been locked into for centuries. Digital modeling makes this possible and inevitable. As drawing transforms (into TGN) it will honor and amplify the function and purpose of its traditional form, and the transformation will be reversible in both directions, automatically.
There’s more here! See the website:
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 