Day 4…General Session, Tuesday @ SWW09

After the General Session that Monday offered it was hard to imagine how it could be outdone by the rest of the week. I am not saying that Tuesday’s General Session out did it but it definitely lived up to expectations.

Fielder Hiss opened up the Tuesday session and it was quickly known that today was going to be a great session again. First on the agenda was a quick speech by Tom Salomone from Hewlett Packard. HP is one of the primary sponsors of SolidWorks WORLD 2009, and I am sure that everyone will 2^nd me in saying thank you to ALL of the sponsors of this event. After Tom left the stage Jeremy Luchini, head of the Certification department at SolidWorks took the stage. Jeremy and his group do an AWESOME job and they deserve a lot of credit for the roughly 500 CSWP’s that showed up to the event on Monday night. Jeremy was joined on stage with Yanick Tremblay from Megabrands who gave everyone an idea of some of the obstacles that they encounter with getting their employees CSWP certified.

After Jeremy & Yanick exited the stage it was time for the main speaker of the day…Jon Hirschtick. Jon, for those of you that don’t already know, is the founder of SolidWorks and former CEO. Jon is an absolute wealth of knowledge in the world on CAD and he loves to share it with everyone he talks to. Jon is currently a Group Executive at SolidWorks and has an office right across the hallway from Jeff Ray, the current CEO. He began his speech by talking about some technology trends that he sees and is really interested in. They were:

Touch / Motion UI
- We were given a preview of a product that has SolidWorks on a touch screen, very cool
Online Applications
- Such as SolidWorks Labs products Drawings Now & Blueprints Now
Video Game Technology
- Ambient Inclusion
3D Printing

Jon then was joined on stage by a couple of customers that he visited this year. The 1^st was Matt Dunbar from New Balance Shoes. This product was amazing and really gave the attendees a new outlook on what goes into the design of shoes as far as CAD goes. The method of a normal design is done by first creating some sketches on paper, then scanning those sketches into SolidWorks, then they use those sketches to begin modeling their shoes, and finally it gets sent off to the 3D printer that they have. They also do a great deal of rapid prototyping using an Objet prototyping machine. A design that used to take 15 days in 2D is now done in 5 days using 3D. The fact that almost knocked me off of my chair was that some of their part models contain up to 1,800 features, amazing.

Jon was the joined on stage by Tom Waldner from Sony Ericsson. The one great thing I got out of his presentation was that they only design for 2-3 hours before they send their design to a 3D printer. This prevents them from designing too long when something is right or isn’t going to work.

Here is where the real fun began. SolidWorks Simulation was put on display and I do not even know how to explain the rest so I will let the pictures do the talking.