Dr Julius Guccione, a 50-year-old cardiac researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, was mesmerised the first time he saw a virtual image of a beating heart. He’d been using math models to research the heart his entire career, but now Dassault Systèmes, a French design and simulation software company, had created a complete, three-dimensional view of the electrical impulses and muscle-fibre contractions that enable the human heart to perform its magic.
If it were a model of his own heart, Guccione would have seen it racing. “This is something doctors have been trying to get to since before the 1900s,” he said. The advent of technologies like magnetic resonance imaging and echocardiography, he said, have been a “dream come true” for measuring abnormal motion in a patient’s heart. But by modelling a beating heart in 3D, the hope is that one day doctors will be able to diagnose and treat patients based on the unique forces at work within each patient and even rehearse open-heart surgery on an individual before opening up his chest.
“The heart isn’t just made of tissue; it also has an electrical current. I compare it to a machine,” says Dassault Systèmes Chief Executive Bernard Charlès, whose company has been creating digital mock-ups of machines like airplanes and automobiles for more than 30 years. With $2.8 billion in revenue and 11,000 employees (3,000 in North America), it’s the leader in the $16 billion market for product life-cycle management (PLM) software, which engineers at companies such as Boeing and Gap use to manage the development of everything from jumbo jets to jeans, saving both time and money.
As the Living Heart project suggests, Charlès, 56, is steering the company in new directions as part of a plan to double its revenue in five years. Instead of just peddling software for designers and manufacturers, Dassault Systèmes is recasting itself as a ‘3D experience company’ whose simulation technology can be applied to just about anything.
Last year it combined its nine software brands, including Catia, Simulia and Enovia, into one 3D Experience Platform, which clients can use to model and simulate not only the way a product is designed or manufactured but even how it is bought, feels or is used. Charlès’s favourite example: A woman with an armful of groceries who swings her leg under the bumper of her Ford SUV, causing the lift gate to open automatically. Catia software helped realise that “experience”.
Dassault Systèmes has already branched out beyond aerospace and automotive design to a total of 12 sectors, including life sciences, architecture and construction, energy and consumer packaged goods. Even some fashion designers are using Dassault Systèmes’s 3D tools to design their collections (though they don’t like to admit it, Charlès says).
SHoP Architects and its virtual construction arm, SHoP Construction, are known for pushing the limits of technology on projects like the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which features an undulating latticework ‘wrapper’ made of 12,000 unique prefabricated, pre-weathered steel panels.
SHoP used Dassault Systèmes’s 3D Experience software to transform the way designers and engineers worked together on the project, streamlining the process by creating a single model that all teams could work from, including plumbers, electricians and carpenters. The 3D model logged changes made by any of the construction teams in real time, so every team, regardless of trade, was always working from the most current information. That helped reduce material costs by 25 percent.
SHoP is now testing a cloud-based version of Dassault Systèmes’s technology to manage its next project—modular, prefabricated houses to replace homes lost in Hurricane Sandy. By sharing 3D design data directly with the Long Island factory that will build the housing modules, SHoP says it will be able to erect a fnished home in just 48 hours, instead of the customary four to six months.
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Harvard professor Peter Der Manuelian is converting its impressive collection of photos, diaries, drawings and documents from Egypt’s Giza pyramids into 3D models so he can take students inside the tombs for a realistic view of the Fourth Dynasty. Armed with that rich data and a 3D printer, he’s even recreating ancient Egyptian artefacts that had long since vanished.
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(This story appears in the 07 February, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)