Boston-based 3D printing company, RIZE has introduced its new Smart Spaces for Innovation initiative which connects 3D printing with technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to enhance productivity for designers, engineers and manufacturers.
Identified as one of Gartner’s top tech trends for this year, Smart Spaces are defined as “…a physical or digital environment in which humans and technology-enabled systems interact in increasingly open, connected, coordinated and intelligent ecosystems.”
Announced just in time its debut at the Additive Manufacturing User’s Group Conference next week, RIZE describes Smart Spaces, Powered by XRIZE, as a “unique packaged solution” which brings together digital and physical environments across three areas; Smart Spaces for Product Innovation, Manufacturing Innovation and Service Innovation. These spaces, RIZE believes, will offer innovative approaches in design with safe, easy and full-colour 3D printing, creating intelligent parts which can be digitally connected to AR/VR technologies, blockchain and intelligent systems. With Smart Spaces, RIZE says companies can accelerate innovation, improve productivity and cut costs by up to 90%.
The three types of Smart Spaces for Innovation are:
Smart Spaces for Product Innovation:
- Accelerates time-to-part with increased iterations
- Enables design and simulation to be on the same page
- Generative shapes can be rapidly validated to create new and lightweight designs.
Smart Spaces for Manufacturing Innovation:
- Cost reductions of up to 90% by producing custom tools, jigs and fixtures, low volume parts and reduce errors in the engineering-to-manufacturing handoff
Smart Spaces for Service Innovation:
- Increases uptime of the plant and equipment by on-demand printing of spare parts and reduce locked capital through digital inventories
- And the part is connected to all of them.
Leveraging the XRIZE’s full-colour voxel-level printing capabilities, Smart Spaces will allow users to build digitally augmented parts in engineering-grade polymers on a single platform, which also includes a license of SOLIDWORKS Standard. The development builds on the company’s previously announced ‘digitally augmented parts’ system which allows users to embed QR codes and information into products using its marking technology.
Julie Reece, Vice President of Marketing at RIZE, explained further: “With Dassault Systemes as an investor and strategic partner, RIZE has developed an end-to-end solution that connects the entire digital ecosystem within a company with a QR code on a printed part. Until today, 3D printed parts were external to these systems. Now, as the industry is moving towards using 3D printing in production, Smart Spaces provides deep connections on the CAD side with SOLIDWORKS, and on the data management side we are connected to how companies manage their data. So the part is connected to the company’s entire digital ecosystem, including maintenance instructions, repair instructions, reordering systems and much more. Using AR/VR, we now have collaboration of the printed part in the context of a much larger assembly.”
RIZE will be exhibiting Smart Spaces, Powered by XRIZE, to the North American market for the first time at AMUG in Chicago, March 31-April 4, 2019 in booth P18.