Software Components and AI
Developing 3D engineering applications is seldom fast or easy. One way to ease development is to use commercially available software components. Software components are developer toolkits that provide standard application capabilities such as modeling, visualization, and data exchange. By using components, development resources can focus on the secret sauce that makes their application more valuable, different, or better at solving end-user challenges.
Today, it seems every application must include AI. Not only does AI enable unique, modern, and highly useful capabilities for companies doing internal software development, but it has also become table stakes for new applications entering the market. AI-enabled functionality will differ across applications. However, software components could provide some fundamental frameworks for AI development. Enter HOOPS AI.
Preview of HOOPS AI
Recently, Jonathan Girroir from Tech Soft 3D gave us a preview of HOOPS AI, a framework to help developers jumpstart their AI development. HOOPS AI is a set of tools built on top of HOOPS Exchange that support machine learning and AI research and development. Rich data sources are at the heart of machine learning. As a long-term provider of data interoperability tools, Tech Soft 3D toolkits process a robust set of translators that can provide rich engineering data to feed machine learning models. HOOPS AI can be used to clean, segment, and organize CAD data. This framework has the potential to quickly allow developers to build their own unique ML workflows.
Unlike typical text-based datasets for LLMs, HOOPS AI works with 3D engineering data such as surface geometry (B-rep), topology, metadata, and assembly relationships. HOOPS AI converts this data into machine-learning formats and connects to popular ML libraries. The machine learning framework includes additional tools for recording, storing, and optimizing workflows.
It should be noted that users of HOOPS AI will need to have their own training data. Tech Soft 3D provides an application development framework for connecting this data to ML algorithms. Tech Soft 3D does not have direct access to this data.
While the toolkit applies across a wide variety of applications and industries, Tech Soft 3D is currently focusing on early adopters in manufacturing, including internal development teams and commercial software vendors.
Our Take
Large independent software vendors likely have the data and resources to accomplish what Tech Soft 3D provides on their own; however, small to medium-sized companies with limited resources and data may find HOOPS AI to be a way to jumpstart their AI-enabled application development. Of course, it takes time for applications to leverage new toolkits and incorporate software components into their offerings. It will be fascinating to see the AI-enabled applications and corresponding capabilities that emerge leveraging HOOPS AI.
Thank you, Charrise Dalton, Fiona Minchella, and Jonathan for the briefing on HOOPS AI!
