These few short articles describe a forthcoming evolution in the development of equipment for visual close study (VCS) within digital models of all kinds in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry and similar industries:
- The Concept
- TGN: an open source VCS development proposal
- Why VCS evolution? Pragmatic answers
- Why VCS evolution? Fundamental answers and the engine of thought
- VCS and Generative AI: a co-evolution
- this article Previous work on VCS evolution
- VCS development roadmap for implementation in every modeling app and platform
- what we know for certain, that’s wrong…
In AEC apps (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) are two primary media types: models and drawings.
Regarding the latter, drawing, or technical drawing, or as it is known by other names:
So-called ‘CAD Drafting’, and the pre-digital form of it, technical drawing by hand, is well described as the expression and articulation of the act of (VCS) visual close study, of, or attentive focus within, mental models.
https://tangerinefocus.com/
I refer to background on each of these, drawing and modeling, and to Dave Weisberg’s History of CAD here:
All apps in AEC (with the exceptions I mention often) enforce the non-fusion of these media, the non-fusion of drawings in models. It’s like forcing recorded sound a hundred years ago to remain NOT infused into silent film.
There actually were people at the time (like Jack Warner) who argued that sound and film should always remain separate and that their fusion would never be commercially viable, or even desired by audiences.
This is a kind of thinking that we might be tempted to drop into a category we could call something like this:
…ideas so obviously useful that it boggles the mind that anyone stood in opposition, particularly people directly affected or in positions of great influence
Because there is such a category, and because it’s so often filled up with instances, it’s worth reviewing the Sound Film case and Jack Warner:
Here’s commentary on the history of the fusion of sound into silent film, a development publicly opposed by Jack Warner. Check it out. It’s mind boggling:
Two primary media types in play in AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) — models and drawings — are good candidates for the same kind of media fusion that gave us Sound Film.
Two completely different media types, of completely different form and purpose, are mutually amplified in fusion producing together a third medium more richly expressive and communicative, a new medium greater than the sum of its two parts, and considered beneficially useful by viewers and authors alike.
This is an assertion.
There are pragmatic and fundamental arguments supporting it:
an INTERPLAY is engaged between these many expressions of visual close study (VCS), which articulate the act of narrowed attentive visual focus, and the wider expansive environment of the whole of the project model. This interplay is a back and forth continuous dynamic. There is good argument that this -is- the basic observable dynamic of thought itself, that the wide/narrow (environment/focus) interplay is a machine of thinking, the engine of thought.
https://tangerinefocus.com/why-do-we-need-better-vcs-equipment-the-pragmatic-answer/
The idea that one side of the interplay can either be discarded or stuck in a non-evolving centuries-old form of expression and externalized from the digital model is simply self-defeating and counterproductive, maximally.
(VCS) development in two phases
Like the fusion of sound in motion picture film creating sound film, the fusion of technical drawing within digital models has both successfully begun, commercially, and been opposed, by those directly affected and in positions of great influence.
The opposition rather boggles the mind, because it’s so self-defeating and counterproductive, for everyone involved. And yet it doesn’t boggle the mind because we know the category, and we know it’s full of mind-boggling instances.
The first phase of VCS development is FUSION
First of all, drawings are VCS equipment:
So-called ‘CAD Drafting’, and the pre-digital form of it, technical drawing by hand, is well described as the expression and articulation of the act of (VCS) visual close study, of, or attentive focus within, mental models.
There’s a nice future ahead, for evolution in VCS equipment’s form of expression within digital models, no matter the manner of generation of those models.
https://tangerinefocus.com/
Since drawings are VCS equipment, their fusion into models is… a fusion of VCS and models.
Drawing-model fusion was introduced commercially first in 2012 as a result of my proposal for doing it, and my good luck getting employed at a software company that agreed to develop what I proposed and hired me to help them design and manage the development.
I’ve kept a page on my (this) website since 2016 with some basic information about that work. Check out the demo videos, playlists and other information there:
The CAD/BIM drawing-model fusion innovation demonstrated in the videos on the Earlier Innovations page has been commercialized since 2012. Nine software companies since then, feature automated drawings-in-model fusion (in a first-generation form of that fusion). Those companies are:
- Bentley (2012)
- Graphisoft (in BIMx Docs, mobile) (2013)
- Dalux
- Revizto
- working together: Morpholio and Shapr3D
- Solidworks (since 2015)
- Tekla
- Autodesk Docs (2022)
This innovation realized my (rob snyder) drawing-model fusion ideas prior to and during the time I was employed at Bentley Systems. I proposed the fusion and led the team that designed and developed it. Before that I was a user of MicroStation software and the Brics ‘BIM’ (before it was called ‘BIM’) module (TriForma) that ran on it, since 1996. In 2007 I wrote to Bentley Systems proposing the drawing-model fusion idea. Eventually this led to my employment there leading the team that designed and developed the drawing-model automated fusion features that were released in May 2012, then marketed as the so-called “hypermodel”.
First-generation VCS innovation, since 2012, automatically displayed CAD drawings (and hand drawings!) in-situ at their true orientation within digital 3D models (within models of various formats and types).
The fusion was referred to commercially as “hypermodel” and has been marketed by Bentley in many of their products including their CAD application, MicroStation. Since the fusion was introduced by Bentley in 2012, now nine software companies since then have designed and developed their own versions of drawing-model fusion.
Here’s a playlist of 30 demonstration videos I made showing the Bentley drawing-model fusion development we built:
Notice the need for continued development of equipment for visual close study (VCS). Why? Because VCS equipment is equipment for engaging with and making sense of high complexity visual spatial environments.
EVOLUTION in VCS’s form of expression
Now that the idea of drawing-model FUSION has been conceptualized, proposed, specified, developed, commercialized, and proliferated among various software products at various companies over the last 12 years (since 2012), it’s time for phase 2.
Phase 2 is an obvious logical next step. Now that technical drawing resides instantiated not only within mental models, but also in-situ at true orientation within digital models, drawings find themselves rooted in different ground, planted in soil in some ways more fertile, in other ways not. But at a minimum, the ground is different.
Rooted in different ground, VCS’s form of expression should evolve.
Why?
Because it can: There are VCS expression possibilities arising from grounding VCS in the digital model that otherwise aren’t readily accessible, or aren’t accessible at all, within the mental model.
And because it must: For reasons pragmatic and fundamental.
What should VCS formal EVOLUTION look like? How should it operate?
I envision and specify what VCS equipment for visual close study, within digital models of all kinds and formats, should become, what VCS should look like, how it should operate —
no matter the manner of model generation, whether models are computationally generated via directed graphs, are made by ‘generative AI’, or made by natural intelligence, ‘NI’ (stick built by human hand), or whether they’re made by device via photogrammetry, laser scanning, gaussian splatting, NeRF’d, etc.
Within all of these model types, and in hybrids of any of them, I propose what VCS equipment should look like, how it should operate within models such that it amplifies the utility of our visual engagements. That is, such that VCS equipment elevates the interpretive perceptual power of our visual engagements with models moving our understanding of very complex modeled environments, and the very complex tasks required of us within them, well beyond superficial understanding, toward adequate understanding, and often beyond adequate.
The proposal is here: TGN: an open source VCS development proposal
An open source team has very recently begun (March 2024) open source development of this TGN VCS development proposal. Announcements and open invitations are forthcoming. Mid-year.
TGN is equipment for looking 