Feature Talk

If we move from an old version to the newer one, the first and most important change is an order of magnitude improvement in 3D quality. We don't move to the new version if we don't get quality to our satisfaction. And boy does the new version deliver!

The new Fabrik platform achieves:

1. More vibrancy and accurate representation of colours.
2. Better contrast to distinguish darker shades.
3. Ability to change the HDR map on the model.
4. Support additional materials.

Coming soon! And we are excited to take the new platform for a spin.

This is a special one - with limited resources on handheld devices, we constantly fight with the hardware to give a rich and minimalist experience while retaining a realistic appearance of the product of interest. ENTER FOG! This seemingly simple feature is incredibly powerful to achieve this feat. It gives a sense of depth to the spatial environment by literally adding a fog in the background, hiding objects beyond a certain distance. When we focus on the product with fog in the back, it accentuates the product while adding a neutral contrasting background with depth. Think of fog as a gradient background for an image. 

Fog is:

1. Low compute -> resource light, 
2. Hides faraway objects and it is not rendered saving resources, and 
3. Adds 3D gradient with depth by controlling the color of the ground and the background.

A 3D environment requires 3D text to make big and bold headlines. 3D text gives this in-your-face/hard-to-ignore messaging that users read and digest. And the depth of text makes it chunky and visible. Control the colour and you have a big message placed subtly in the scene or have something that stands out.

Fabrik platform for 3D text supports:

1. All fonts (for English),
2. Behaves like 3D models complete with it's own materials, maps, shadows and reflections, and
3. We can apply Office 97 -esque animations on them (who wouldn't want that!).

There are gaps in supporting Ottaksharagalu in 3D text for Indian languages and a massive opportunity to cover 1.4 billion people in India.

We managed to load up a lot of capabilities on our platform, and applied copious amounts of band-aids to make it work with good frame rates for the longest time. As we build out Fabrik v2.0 from scratch, we have a great opportunity to correct these foundational errors. Performance benchmarking is the cornerstone of customer experience and we have made it front-and-centre of the new application. It captures parameters related to:

1. Device (smartphones/tablets, laptops, and wearables),
2. Software (OS, browser)
3. Content (3D/CAD, DEM, MQTT, multimedia), and
4. Network (Internet speed, and any restrictions).

Using these factors, we will control the size and quality of content beamed to the device. And more importantly, every new feature must pass the performance smell test before released to production. Rest assured, we will always have 30-90 frames per second for any experience on Fabrik, with corresponding warnings if these fall below the threshold.

Almost half the time, we wait for Fabrik to load the app - the 3D models, the DEM, the video content, etc. We are making use of this load time by introducing new features that users can explore in Fabrik. This one is two features for the post of one. We not only have avatar with keyboard and touch controls, but we also introduce that through Fabrik Loader. We don't want the Loader itself to be the thing that slows our application more versus keeping the users engaged. So it is run as separate blocks of code independent of the app's main routine.

And just look at that avatar walk, it's such fun to just make it walk around all the time.