Autodesk’s cloud computing offering called Project Butterfly was launched as a public beta in early January, following the company’s purchase of the Israel-based start-up VisualTao. This new online CAD environment (think Google Docs for CAD) garnered a great deal of buzz at the 2009 AU event, and the site has been further validated by the user community through great use. Project Butterfly represents the culmination of an ongoing vision to preserve drawing intelligence while offering a secure and collaborative environment.
In just four months, there have been more than 25,000 drawing uploaded to the site and more than 90,000 site visits. While the project is not yet a product, there is aggressive development work to improve the level of service to make it more durable and scalable, and to offer new features.
I spoke today with Tal Weiss, one of the lead developers on the project, and he emphasized the fact that Project Butterfly harnesses the unique capabilities of the cloud to access content anywhere, use the web as a collaborative medium, and harness the cloud’s infinite storage online. The tool seems ideally suited for CAD masters to share their drawings and collaborate with more casual CAD users without requiring them to install any software.
The Google Maps overlay function has been a particularly strong feature, because within just three weeks of the launch of this function there were more than 1,000 drawings overlayed with imagery. According to the company’s statistics, this interest in putting drawing in context included a large number of geospatial users. With this strong validation of the overlay function, Autodesk has subsequently added the ability to import backdrop images in more than 30 different file formats.
One of the key features of the site is the integrated project timeline feature that takes advantage of the infinite storage on the cloud. The timeline reinforces the ongoing collaboration of work teams and groups as it allows anyone to take a look back in time to see when and how the drawings were altered at any point in time.
I asked whether we might see a city-level data set hosted in the Cloud in the future, and received enthusiastic response to the idea. It’s technically possible, there’s a lot of potential with such an approach, and it’s an interesting direction. I subsequently learned that a good number of the development team have a geospatial background, so it appears that Map 3D and Civil 3D functionality on the cloud may not be too far behind.
For regular updates on the evolution of Project Butterfly, be sure to access the following resources:
- BLOG: autodeskbutterfly.wordpress.com
- YouTube: youtube.com/autodeskbutterfly.com
- Twitter: @projbutterfly
