Opinion: 3D rendering offers Acrobat and PDF an entree into the manufacturing world, which accounts for a third of the world's economy—but that third dimension also creates much-needed PDF eye candyThe interview business is all about the interviewees: Getting them to say stuff that makes compelling content and—unless you're Tim Hardaway—that usually means positive, insightful statements that inform and make us reflect upon an issue, a technology, or ourselves in a new way.
Most of the time, accomplishing that means that interviewers sit down and shut up. We insert occasional questions or asides to steer the conversation a little. Certainly I try to keep my opinions to myself, because the interview's about the interviewee's perspective—and not mine.
Plus, the expert I'm interviewing typically knows oceans more about the topic we're discussing than I ever will; in those cases, just about anything I say comes off pedestrian, myopic, or flat-out ignorant. Despite knowing this, I sometimes just can't help myself. Especially when interviewees turn the tables, put me on the spot, and ask me a question.
That's how I happened to ram my foot in my mouth Tuesday, when I told Michael Lynch and Rix Kramlich I thought there was no "wow" left for PDF. Lynch had asked me what I thought was the future of PDF, and I'd said, well, with Photoshop and Illustrator, Adobe always adds new "wow" features that bring new and amazing eye candy that can sell each successive version.
Acrobat and PDF is inherently a hard sell, I said, because its new "wow" usually involves arcane stuff like interface refinements. The next version will be harder to sell than the last, because it doesn't feel like much of an upgrade, even though the Acrobat team might have achieved its most glorious milestones in forms process integration or prepress functionality. Adobe will just have to figure out how to address new customers with each rev, wow factor be damned.
"Well, I think we're bringing some 'wow' to PDF," said Lynch, at which point I remembered to whom I was speaking: Two guys whose company, Right Hemisphere, wrote pieces of the 3D rendering engine used in Acrobat 3D and the 3D viewer in Reader, and whose Acrobat plug-ins and standalone apps build 3D graphics into PDF documents en route to publishing. Right Hemisphere (Lynch is the CEO, Kramlich the marketing VP) also is working with Microsoft, integrating its technology into Windows Vista and the next Office.
Heck yes, they're bringing the wow, which they actually refer to as "3D publishing"—the process of repurposing and reusing engineering design data downstream as 3D graphics for consumers, customers, business partners, and other non-engineering types. In a nutshell, Right Hemisphere software takes static 2D renderings—as well as statistics about them—and combine them into 3D images without expending human bandwidth, then package them to output formats like PDF, which don't require proprietary viewers like a lot of 3D application files do.
Version 5 of the company's flagship app, due March 13, claims a complete pipeline that can create an interactive 3D PDF from static data and 2D images. It can add industry-standard labeling, an important component of manufacturing business. All this can happen on a single-page level like in Acrobat 3D, or for thousands of pages of, say, an auto-parts manual. Outputting to PDF then avails the LiveCycle suite of tools that controls access, distribution and forms/ordering interactivity.
That's not just theoretical techno-babble, it's for real: At Chrysler, Right Hemisphere servers enable the production of materials that reach out to micro-market niches where there are car buyers waiting to purchase vehicles in a particular trim level, if they knew it existed. Except the marketing pieces required more money and time to create by hand than the potential sales could justify. Right Hemisphere servers now mint interactive PDFs that just weren't feasible on a human scale.
Wow.
Right Hemisphere is invested in Adobe's success, but it's also got its eggs spread across many baskets such as Vista, Office, and engineering design software throughout the manufacturing sector. Which, Lynch is quick to point out, accounts for a third of the world's economy. So what does Right Hemisphere think about the future of Acrobat: Is Acrobat and PDF helping 3D push outside of the engineering and manufacturing space, or is 3D helping PDF take root in that new vertical market? They think both.
"One of Adobe's goals is to become more relevant to the core processes in the manufacturing space," Kramlich says. "You have to have [3D data] innately built in . . . because that's where their core ideas are, and that's the only way PDF can be relevant."
"I think when you put 3D or any other type of graphics into PDF, it opens those graphics to new markets, but it also opens those markets to using those platforms," Lynch added, saying that companies in non-manufacturing markets—such as biotech researchers, MRI scanners, and astrophysicists mapping galaxies— have taken a first look at Right Hemisphere 3D products because of PDF. "Other markets will use PDF in ways we never thought possible."
