Immersive Design's flagship IPA v8.1 gives users the ability to input animation into any Adobe Acrobat 7.0 PDF file.Immersive Design Inc. has announced the release of its flagship product, IPA v8.1, which allows users to input fully functional 3-D animation into any Adobe Acrobat 7.0 PDF file.
For companies distributing their product documentation in Adobe PDF format, IPA gives users the ability to generate interactive 3-D documentation and do more with their existing documents for procedure, training and promotional purposes.
IPA v8.1, which must be used in conjunction with Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0 or higher, adds the ability to quickly and easily create interactive 3-D PDF files that can be opened and viewed by anyone with the free Adobe Reader 7.0 software.
IPA v8.1 automates the process of generating interactive 3-D documentation in PDF format.
IPA automatically generates the 3-D PDF document and associated actions so that the user follows the process steps inside the document.
Going from an MCAD assembly to the interactive 3-D PDF file takes just a few minutes.
Through the creation of Microsoft Word documents that include all the necessary information for 3-D PDF generation, IPA users also have the ability to enhance their existing documentation by embedding the IPA-generated Word documents in their current publications and publishing an enhanced 3-D PDF file.
"It's an automated process that takes just a couple of minutes," said Gregory Smith, CEO of Immersive Design.
"This really takes 3-D models out of the hands of the engineer and outside of engineering. You can pull a CAD file into our application, create animation and create the intermediate Word file and then create the PDF from that.
"That allows companies that have these huge manuals to update them and reuse their existing PDFs but with the enhanced 3-D animation."
Immersive Design originally showed this technology off at the SolidWorks World Conference in February, but the company was still tweaking features at that point.
Today, according to Smith, his company has done a lot to improve the viewer in Acrobat, and he says Immersive and Adobe are still working closely to make even more improvements to help with the 3-D experience inside the PDF.
"Our focus is really on the horizontal industry with companies that make medical instruments, manufacturing and heavy equipment," Smith said. "We're just going to continue to make it easier and easier to pull CAD into a PDF."
In the press release, Immersive shows an automotive service manual assembly where a user can click on the text or the picture and activate a live 3-D model.
Smith said that can be coupled with a part number in the text with a live model allowing you to order what you see.
"There are many applications," Smith said. "We're going to add additional functionality to the [Adobe] viewer in the area of animation."
