Detailed 3D computer models are used for everything from designing jet airplanes to creating ultra-realistic environments for first-person shooter games. But often these files stay trapped in an engineer's or digital content creator's high-powered workstation instead of being shared with others in the company: The PCs in the marketing department and notebooks carried by salespeople simply can't handle the immense size and complex graphics of 3D renderings.

But now a new standard dubbed Universal 3D (U3D) promises to let users share those files across the enterprise, over the Web, and even on handheld devices.

Universal 3D was developed by the 3D Industry Forum to serve as an open, extensible 3D visualization and repurposing format, with the ability to download computer-aided design (CAD) models with progressive detail -- in other words, to let the marketing department show off the top layer of a model, while engineers and designers examine the skeleton.

Forum members range from ATI and Nvidia to HP and Boeing, but perhaps U3D's most prominent backers are Intel Corp. and Adobe Systems. The latter has added Universal 3D support to the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). The hope is to bring some kind of unity to a mish-mash of different 3D file formats.

"I see usage of U3D growing rapidly over the next three years as companies expand their innovation networks," predicts Bob Parker, vice president of Manufacturing Insights, a market-research firm that specializes in business processes. "U3D is less rich [than some formats] in the ability to modify, but its high levels of compression and fit into Adobe Acrobat make it a great way of extending 3D exchange to the next tier of trading partners who need drawings."

Working with 3D data presents a number of problems for companies, because it is so voluminous. "3D model data is special in that it, by definition, can contain all other media as a subset," explains Richard Boyd, CEO of 3Dsolve, a firm that creates collaborative simulation learning solutions for the government, military, and corporations. "Care must be taken in the density of data that is exported to protect industry trade secrets as well as to avoid overwhelming the target user.

"With U3D, there are filters for exporting from CAD different levels of data appropriate for the target use of the data," Boyd continues. "A training application will receive one level of data, while technical support or marketing or simulation applications will receive another level of data. These new applications will improve training and customer service and shorten sales cycles."

In developing the spec, the 3D Industry Forum focused on making U3D a natural part of engineering workflow and product lifecycle management. Previous standards efforts, Boyd says, treated 3D media as a special data type, but the 3DIF team treated it as just another media type that can be integrated into word processing or presentation documents -- to use one of the association's favorite phrases, "the JPG of 3D."

"People almost had a reverence for 3D data and considered it as something separate and distinct from a document or a process," Boyd recalls. "People don't want to interact with 3D objects; they want to get their work done."

Acrobat Goes 3D

Adobe's announcement earlier this year that it was building U3D support into Acrobat and Adobe Reader 7.0 was a breakout moment for the new format. The new versions of Acrobat and Reader incorporate Deep View technology from Right Hemisphere to enable users to view 3D content. To perform more advanced CAD data preparation, translation, authoring, or publishing with Acrobat 7.0, users can purchase Right Hemisphere's Deep Exploration software separately. Deep Exploration supports over 120 different data types as well as translating CAD files from their native formats into U3D.

Meanwile, workflow benefits will open up 3D activity to the next tier of participants at a lower cost. "Adobe has workflow support that will assure that users have the latest version of an item and that they can also attach some form processing -- say, a service report for maintenance personnel," explains Parker. "It won't be a poor man's product data management solution [because] it doesn't have the capability, but [U3D] brings down the cost and has enough functionality to expand the universe of participation."

Still, questions remain about how U3D will fit into a market already crowded with 3D file formats, many of which have streaming capabilities, such as X3D, XGL, XSI, DXF, and more. Initially, U3D will be used not so much by itself but as an extension of the Acrobat PDF format.

"The U3D file format will be an advantage for those companies who currently use PDF as their archive format of choice," predicts Lynne Saunders, vice president of worldwide marketing at Actify, a company that specializes in converting 2D and 3D CAD data for use within Microsoft Office and other applications.

While Actify is a member of the 3DIF consortium, it will support any format its clients choose to use, Saunders says: "Actify has just launched support for the U3D format, [but] currently none of our 8,000 worldwide customer companies use it in production, to our knowledge."

That caution on customers' part leads Saunders to believe it will take some time before U3D becomes pervasive. Broad adoption of the new format, she says, will depend upon the amount of continued support from Adobe and Intel. "In addition," she declares, "what will be needed is continued CAD file format portability to U3D. We don't expect this format to gain broad adoption in the short term."