HOOPS Communicator 2019 Adds WebAssembly Rendering and Support for BIM Collaboration Format

Tech Soft 3D, the leading provider of engineering software development toolkits (SDKs), has announced this month the new HOOPS Communicator 2019 software development kit with powerful new technology for building advanced web-based engineering applications.

For Powerful 3D Web-based Applications—Communicator 2019

HOOPS Communicator now uses WebAssembly for the core rendering component, which will lead to a drastic reduction in library size—reduced by 50 percent—as well as performance improvements. The Javascript library will be half as large and will naturally speed download and startup times for HOOPS Communicator 2019 based apps.

Support for AEC BIM Apps

HOOPS Communicator 2019 also adds support for the BIM Collaboration Format (BCF), adding import functionality which will aid communicating coordination information associated with IFC models in AEC applications.

01 – HOOPS Communicator 2019 now supports WebAssembly for faster delivery of the rendering code, higher performance of HOOPS Communicator-based web applications and new support for BCF for AEC industry apps.

BCF support is a critical feature for software developers building AEC BIM applications for web-based delivery. These tools provide a robust environment for visualization, query, and navigation of construction models.

“Faster and better – these are the constant demands of both developers and users of engineering applications,” said Erik Hultgren, Product Manager Visualization Solutions, Tech Soft 3D. “We continue to enhance HOOPS Communicator with this in mind, and also focus on providing the highest quality graphics possible with today’s technology. No other toolkit can provide the kind of speed, quality and visual fidelity we know are expected when creating complex 3D engineering applications.”

Other Improvements

A new shadow and reflection plane support are also new in HOOPS Communicator 2019, where the viewer can optionally render ground-plane shadows and reflections that automatically update when the geometry changes, improving web graphics visualization.

Further benefits have been made to shattered loading, where loading large 3D models on the web is made faster than ever.

For more information about HOOPS Communicator 2019, visit: https://www.techsoft3d.com/products/hoops/communicator/

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

WebAssembly (or Wasm for short) is World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintained open standard that is designed to speed the Javascript engine of a web browser to execute page scripts almost as fast as native machine code. By placing the Javascript code of HOOPS Communicator’s rendering into the WebAssembly executable framework, the performance of rendering is made much faster. WebAssembly is becoming a critical compliment technology to the Khronos Group’s WebGL standard. 

The BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) first emerged by Solibri and Tekla and became a standard managed by buildingSMART. It has been adopted by many BIM applications as a method of exchanging collaborative information. Part of the standard supports web services via the “bcfAPI” as a standardized RESTful API.