I'm working on a construction project right now (not as an architect/engineer) and I can tell you right now that live collaboration is THE killer feature (your slick UI not withstanding).
If this job is anything to go by, the current state-of-the-art appears to be a single Revit model file released once a month, 10,000 excel spreadsheets and 3,000 PDFs of various versions and quality spread between Sharepoint and a Document management server.
I'm sure you've got an amazing roadmap, but it would be great to see you apply a modern take on:
- how to handle version control in a multi-user environment (endless designing is fun, but at some point you need to draw a line in the sand so that people can start work, then changes need to be highlighted for the guy on the ground swinging a hammer)
- collaboration with 3rd-parties that may have a subset of design responsibilities (e.g. HVAC, electrical - they can place things in a room, but can't adjust the dimensions of a room)
- design reviews - current state-of-the-art seems to be marking up PDFs of DWGs with comments (which the supplier completely ignores on their next revision)
I look forward to watching this product evolve!
Small typo on your Love Letter to Designers post:
"A promise we will make at Arcol is tolisten first"
Check out the announce video that explains some of the ideas behind it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-o-carroll-38aaa1105_arco...
Feel free to post any questions and I'll do my best to answer!
Also, being asked to login to view the demo vid is jarring. The play button signifies a video to me, if it's a demo I'd choose a different symbol (and put it somewhere other than the center of the video).
Good point about the play button, I'll pass that feedback along. :)
Im not experienced enough to know if early stage mep designers will find this useful.
Did a brief stint at one of your competitors and it's really cool how far browser based engineering tools have come in the years since I worked on them at Arup.
Webassembly is a blessing for that I imagine.
Right now, we have design options to present and compare different options and variants of scenes, and boards and comments, but we don't enforce any workflow.
Looking at how customers use these features and adding tools to enable this is definitely a big focus in the near term.
It could be useful for greyboxing or even just generating some rough shapes though. We do export GLTF which is easy to get into game engines.
One day we'd love to take them on directly, I think there's a lot of architects out there looking for something better.
As far as collaboration features, we've built it from the ground up with collaboration in mind, so you can work with other users directly in the same scene and see their actions and updates. We've got collaborative presentation boards with views and metrics that can update live, and of course workflow features like commenting. And since it's browser based, there's not the friction of installing a desktop app, which can be significant at some orgs.
We'd love to know what you think though, give it a try and let us know what collaboration features you'd use!
This is an older blog post but it covers the general idea of it: https://blog.arcol.io/parametric-geometry-engine