Imagineer Technical 2.0:
The Next Generation of CAD

Dr. Joel Orr

Progress in CAD is not smooth and linear. Things do not get steadily better for users. Rather, there are long periods of “nothing much happening,” punctuated by breakthroughs at irregular intervals. During the “nothing much happening” stretches, users are improving their skills with existing CAD products, becoming incrementally more productive by learning to use their tools more effectively.

But when a breakthrough comes along, it catapults those who use it into a whole new realm of effectiveness. Imagineer Technical 2.0 represents such a breakthrough.

CAD is very much an automation of a manual process, with the intent of producing hard copy more efficiently than by hand. It has taken a very long time for CAD system designers to think of ways to modify the process to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the computer. Also, it is only recently that inexpensive computers have had the power to support some of the human interface ideas that have intrigued researchers for a couple of decades.

Imagineer 2.0 appears at the confluence of several development streams: Object technology has been refined and incorporated in common operating system infrastructures; graphics technology has become very fast and inexpensive; the World-Wide Web has transformed the way we think about sharing information, in engineering as well as generally; and the essence of engineering drawing has been captured by human interface researchers and applied to interaction techniques.

When you use this product, you immediately have a sense of elegant simplicity. What is not obvious is that Imagineer 2.0 has been subjected to a pre-release testing process unlike anything the world of CAD products has ever seen. The net result is that despite the underlying complexity of this innovative software, the user gets an easy-to-use design package.

Another important aspect of the design of Imagineer 2.0 is that it takes into account the existing world of CAD users. It reads and writes leading CAD system formats, so that even users who do not replace their current systems with Imagineer 2.0 can take advantage of its design and drafting power.

The integration with the Web is impressive, and holds great promise for improving design collaboration on a global scale.

The Imagineer view of the desktop as encompassing all the resources of the Internet is consonant with Microsoft’s. Intergraph has grasped the power of the Web vision, and Imagineer is a nicely integrated manifestation of that understanding. The use of intranets for collaborative engineering is an important trend, and Imagineer is perfectly poised to facilitate it.

However, these features pale in the light of the human interface refinements represented in this product. The SmartSketch and FreeSketch capabilities give Imagineer an almost uncanny ability to recognize your intent, and respond accordingly. The use of “smart” objects gives you a subtle and easy-to-assimilate form of parametric design. Imagineer creates a workspace that is so fluid, so engaging, that the designer is drawn into a state of “flow” without even realizing it.

All of this innovation does not come at the expense of the more mundane demands of traditional drafting. Imagineer has excellent, easy-to-use dimensioning facilities. And Imagineer even goes further to provide kinematic animation for mechanism modeling The full power of Windows word processing is behind the text management capability, True Type fonts and all.

Built-in kinematic animation is just one of the facilities Imagineer gives designers.

Not only is it integrated with the Web, but through full server and client OLE support Imagineer interacts with other similarly-equipped Windows software; Excel spreadsheets, for example, can be tied to parametric designs.

I am excited about this product because, in a sense, I’ve been waiting for it. This is what I’ve wanted designing to be like for a long time.

Dr Joel Orr

©1998 Intergraph Corporation, Reproduced with permission.