Absolutely. Kaon is a leading provider of creative services for product communications, for companies like Dell, Cisco, and Ricoh. The vSpace family of software products is designed for Industrial Designers and Creative Services professionals, who already use 3D tools, and want to create more compelling applications with that 3D content. If you are a product marketing manager, see the Kaon home page for details on how Kaon delivers superior communications solutions.
If you want to use your 3D content with the vSpace tools, then you need vSpace Master. This is the tool you use to convert your 3D models into the XMM format, and to create basic web Product Tours. vSpace Master includes the Meson Platform. The real quesion is whether you need vSpace Texture and/or vSpace Server. Those are next...
Probably not. vSpace Master will automatically compress all textures into streaming wavelets, using default settings. These defaults are derived from statistical analysis of thousands of textures Kaon has manually compressed over the years. You need vSpace Texture only if you regularly use a ton of texture: tens of megapixels, dozens of individual textures; or if you need to create the smallest possible download sizes, need to control the exact priority order of texture loading, or are creating models from photographs and need the most sophisticated unused-area cropping tools. We recommend that you start with vSpace Master, and add vSpace Texture only if you find it necessary for your models.
If you regularly need to create stills, illustrations, or videos for someone else, and wish they could just do it themselves, then yes, you need vSpace Server. If you want to create web product tours for e-commerce and need features like internationalization, 3D hot areas with text popups, and reusable look and feel templates, then vSpace Server will make it a lot easier to do your job. As with vSpace Texture, we recommend that you start with vSpace Master, and add vSpace Server only if you find it necessary for your applications.
Yes, we call the technique . Using a combination of CSS, Javascript, and DHTML, you can make the 3D model appear to be inside a Flash presentation. You can control the 3D model from Flash the same way you control DHTML/Javascript from Flash. And using CSS/DHTML/Javascript, you can make the 3D model come and go as needed. Follow the link at the right for a working example and full discussion of the technique.
Yes. PowerPoint supports Internet Explorer embedded on a slide, and we've written some really cool VBA code that lets you leverage that to embed an entire 3D application right in a PowerPoint slide. There is no plug-in to download, and all 3D data is stored right inside the PowerPoint slides, so there are no extra files to send around. From within vSpace Master, choose the menu item Help > Extras to get the template and detailed instructions.
Yes. vSpace directly exports to the U3D format supported in Adobe Reader 7, and also emits the necessary JavaScript to retain all the animation and appearance attributes you set up in vSpace. There are three ways to use the PDF export:
Yes. vSpace Master includes a stand-alone viewer that you can put on a CD to view a product tour without launching a web browser. Note that this viewer requires a Java run-time on the destination machine. The easiest way to ensure things work is to put Java right on the CD along with the tour. For best performance, you'll want to include the latest Java (about 40MB). If size is an issue, you can include an older Java, like version 1.1.8, which has lower performance, but takes only 3MB of space. You can launch the tour directly from the CD, or it can be invoked by Flash or another media presentation program for a more embedded experience.
Yes. vSpace Master includes a nice look-and-feel template for basic walk-through navigation. Note, however, that there is no collision detection in the current viewer. If we find that there is demand for this, we will add basic collision detection through a Gluon (extra Java code, that you can optionally load into the viewer for applications that need it).
Yes. You can easily launch pop-up windows, or direct other frames to show more information based on user actions inside the tour. You can also embed silent links back to your server to track statistics about how people use the tours you create.
Buy vSpace Master, and you can use the Meson viewing platform as much as you like. Use it on your own web site and on sites you create for other people. Embed it on CDs. Bake it into PowerPoint presentations. ZIP up your tours and send them via email. All this reuse is included in the purchase price of vSpace Master. However, if you are a 3D software company, and want to bundle our platform as your web viewing solution, that's not included -- contact us and we'll work out a licensing deal.
Yes, for vSpace Master. Click Here for a free trial of vSpace Master. There are no free trials for other vSpace products at this time.
Yes! You are allowed to use the Free Trial version of vSpace Master to create commercial 3D presentations for your clients.
We can read DWF and VRML97/VRML2/X3D files, one of which is exported by pretty much every 3D authoring program. However, we've found that some VRML exporters are better than others, so we continually tweak our VRML reader to accomodate the peculiar quirks of various programs. If you are using a 3D program that isn't listed here, send a sample VRML file to vspace@kaon.com, and if there's a problem, we'll make sure the next point release of the software can read it. Of course, we cannot read what isn't there, so for some programs we are augmenting this VRML approach with exporters directly to our XMM format, or writing product-specific importers. The following table shows what we've actually tried in our lab:
Please look at our Knowledge Base for our growing library of tutorials and support articles. Please follow the contact link on that page if you need direct customer support.