Hello! We’re proud to announce a massive change to the internals of the Spatial Toolbox with widespread performance and ease-of-use improvements. We’ve also been in the news a bit and have a couple miscellaneous cool things to share with you!

New

Scene Graph

Our team member Ben Reynolds recently finished his massive project of reworking how the Spatial Toolbox describes the positions of objects in space. Previously, it was a bit arcane with opaque matrices galore. Now that we have a proper, consistent scene graph, each object has a clear hierarchy of parent objects with easy to read coordinates (and some matrices). Our new approach lets us refer to “that lamp on your writing desk in your home” instead of “that lamp at position 11.2, 0.4, 31.2 with scale 0.1.”

We’re hoping this work makes it even easier to create compelling coordinated 3d experiences with the Spatial Toolbox.

Official Blog Post

Nancy White has released an excellent article outlining our work in bringing augmented reality to the architectural scale. You can check out this post on the official PTC blog.

WebGL Proxy Performance

Our experimental work on a WebGL Proxy continues to bear fruit. An optimization to the amount of messages sent by the proxy has nearly doubled the amount of independent 3d content you can have on screen at once. This enables our 3d robot navigation and other demos to have silky-smooth performance regardless of how complex your plan may be.

Upcoming

Azure Kinect Reality Zone Open Sourcing

In the next few weeks we plan to open source the Reality Zone! This Unity-based project meshes together the views from several depth cameras to form a real-time digital twin. You can then operate this twin using a remote version of the Spatial Toolbox.

Scene Graph App Store Release

While the scene graph work has landed on our main GitHub branch, we’re still testing it out before pushing it to the app store. If you want to help out with this process, please follow the instructions on GitHub to build a development version of the app from source.

Stay tuned for more updates on the development of the Spatial Toolbox! Please drop by our Forum if you have any questions about our current platform or suggestions for where we should go next.