PTC Adds Generative Design and AR to Atlas Cloud Portfolio

Atlas hold up a celestial sphere. Statue in Royal Palace of Amsterdam. (Photo by Ed Lim.)

PTC added two more products to its newly formed software as a service (SaaS) division, Atlas, formed after the company’s acquisition of Onshape. Joining Onshape are Creo Generative Design Extension and Vuforia Expert Capture, the first to follow Onshape in PTC’s new Atlas platform.
What is Atlas?

Atlas was the Titan (Greek mythology) condemned to hold up the sky and stars (not the Earth, as is commonly believed), a punishment after the Titans lost their war with the gods. PTC may identify as the mythological giant holding a world wide web of its applications. PTC’s Atlas is Onshape’s code for a web-based application stripped of the design functions into which two applications have been poured. More applications are expected to follow.

Andrew Kimpton, VP, Atlas Development at PTC (Picture courtesy of LinkedIn.)

“The new Vuforia and Creo applications immediately gain the incredible operational and technical scalability of the modern, multi-tenant Atlas architecture,” said Andrew Kimpton, Vice President, PTC Atlas Development, PTC.

What is Creo Generative Design Extension?

Comparison of GDX and GTO (Picture courtesy of PTC.)

Generative design, possibly the most compute intensive operation an engineer would ever attempt, can exhaust the most powerful desktop workstation, making it well suited for high performance computing (HPC), scalable cloud computing resources, or best of all, the combination of the two. Creo had offered generative design before (with Creo 7.0, introduced at LiveWorx 2020) with its Generative Topology Optimization (GTO) extension which optimized on the local workstations. The more recent Generative Design Extension (GDX) takes optimization to the cloud.

Users can still use the older, local-locked GTO but will be limited to being able to evaluate a given design for a single material and set of constraints. If you have many choices, either materials, manufacturing methods, etc., PTC advises you to get GDX and let “AI and the cloud do the rest.” GDX will also help you narrow your choices from all the solution found, according to PTC.

We could find no mention of how much it will cost to use GDX.

PTC acquired Frustrum for its generative design technology in 2018 for about $70 million and has since made the technology available for its CAD application, Creo with the GTO extension.

Brian Thompson, DVP and GM, CAD Segment at PTC (Picture courtesy of PTC.)

“The seamless integration between GDX on Atlas and the Creo CAD environment gives our customers unparalleled access to the elastic compute resources needed for AI-driven generative design,” said Brian Thompson, Divisional Vice President and General Manager, CAD Segment, PTC.

What is Vuforia Expert Capture?

Vuforia Expert Capture lets users record a procedure to have it played back to others through an augmented reality device. (Picture courtesy of PTC.)

Vuforia is PTC’s augmented reality (AR) technology acquired in 2015. PTC chose to have Vuforia, previously serving a general market with AR content authoring, focus on maintenance, repair and operations (MRO).

Vuforia Expert Capture lets those who are accustomed to maintenance, repair or manufacturing tasks (experts) record their tasks and replay them for others through an AR device, like a Microsoft HoloLens headset or a handheld device, like a tablet or smartphone.

Vuforia Expert Capture was introduced at the 2019 PTC user conference, LiveWorx.

Michael Campbell, EVP & GM, Augmented Reality at PTC. (Picture courtesy of PTC.)

“With the power of Atlas, we’re able to provide Vuforia users a robust set of capabilities that they need to scale deployments in the enterprise, including version control, content management, and approval workflows that would have taken years to deliver without Atlas,” says Mike Campbell, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Augmented Reality, PTC.