MCADCafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Vizseek

By Matt Judge, Vice President, Imaginestics, Vizseek

Matt Judge

In 2023, we see greater demand for mechanical computer-aided design, supported by tools such as visual search.

The fluctuations in the business world since early 2020, plus the current unrest in 2023, where half of the tech companies are hiring and half are cutting staff, make specific growth predictions highly challenging, so we will leave that part blank.

The world went digital in the 1980s. Documents that were once in files, inside filing cabinets, became an organized set of ones and zeros on a hard drive on a desktop, then in the server room. Now, many of those digital documents are in the cloud.

This move away from blueprints and other paper solved many problems and made it easy to create, modify and share files, but it created a new and unexpected problem: Employees had to find that file again. This seems like a simple matter of searching, but it is far more complex. Individuals and departments developed different protocols for naming and storing files, and it only takes seconds to rename a file after it has been saved. Even if everyone followed procedures, someone could move a folder or entire directory with a mouse click.

This created a dilemma when creating a design and you were certain you had already created this component. If you didn’t know the file name or location, you had two bad options: you could waste valuable work hours trying to find it, or you could abandon the search, start the design again, and duplicate your work, which meant two drawings, two similar or identical parts, two sets of tooling and two part numbers to track. Neither of these is desirable for highly skilled staff.

And if your company purchased an overseas company with tens of thousands of files in a different language, there was now an entire new set of complications to overcome.

The first text search engines came out in the early 90s. These were massively helpful, but only if part of the file name (or some text in the file) matched the input. What’s more, the staffer often knew the shape of the needed design, but they were no help when the thing you needed to locate was defined by shape. You can’t type a shape.

This is where visual search comes in. This technology, developed in the early 2000s and continually improving, allows the person with a problem to solve, whether an ecommerce consumer, field technician, designer or other user, to use any available input to find a target file. Web search engines such as Google Images and Bing Image Search comb the internet to find photos that match input photos. Visual search for MCAD professionals works within a contained, private environment, searching only that company’s data. To be effective, it needs to work with various CAD formats, pdfs, photos, and all MS Office files.

Once the visual search tool indexes the files, it creates a marker, like a fingerprint, so it can find that file again based on shape.

This allows designers to take a photo with their phone — or drag and drop any type of file, like a pdf or a 3D model – to locate anything in your database containing that shape, regardless of the input and target file types.

Thus, as MCAD continues to grow in use, visual search engines will boost the efficiency of this technology by making existing files easy to find, eliminating duplicated work, and making work hours more productive, whether remote or in the office.

The increasing awareness and acceptance of what was once exotic technology makes the expansion of AI-driven digital design inevitable.

Matt Judge is Vice President of Imaginestics LLC and is a frequent speaker at business events in many fields. His work has taken him to over 25 countries. He can be reached at matt.judge@vizseek.com

Category: Industry Predictions

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