I recently attended the A/E/C Systems '96 show in Anaheim, California, the world's most comprehensive event for computer-oriented design and construction professionals. Like no other show in the industry, A/E/C Systems has over 150 practical conference sessions, 425 company exhibit floor covering 300,000 square feet, and features every major technology vendor in the industry. While there, I attended a keynote address given by the top four experts in computer graphics in the country. They each gave their views and insight on where CAD will be in five years, which I share here as the theme of this article.

About fifteen years ago, computers were a scarce resource and CAD really meant drafting. A CAD seat generally cost five to ten times the annual salary of the person using it. It took weeks of training to draw a line from point A to point B, and there wasn't any color. Most vendors created huge barriers to be able to access and use any valuable information. By the 1980s, we were dealing with islands of automation. CAD still meant drafting, but it was no longer such a scarce resource. It started to decentralize, and CAD systems started to move into the office and generally moved down in price to between one and three times the annual salary of the person using it. By 1990, systems began to be tied together and the cost was down to about the annual salary of the operator. We started networking, enabling people to work on the same project at the same time. We developed new positions that never before existed: the CAD manager and network administrator.

Today, the focus has moved from facilitating or maximizing the productivity of the machine to maximizing the productivity of the person. The focus is on work group computing. Not only do we have these systems networked , but also people have started using them to facilitate projects. The price is down to about one or two months' salary. Hardware is now a minor component of the systems. It is no longer a capital expense but an ongoing budgetary item. Training and technical support are the major cost factors.

Currently, you can get a substantial capability for about one tenth of what it cost fifteen years ago, The performance is 1000 times faster, software is well integrated, and the user has excellent access to data files. Yet, in some cases, the design procedures have to catch up to the technology. Many of these packages come from different vendors and you are not locked into a single turnkey vendor providing the entire solution.

So what's next? In 1994, DOS was still in the mainstream and most people were using AutoCad R11 and running 386s and 486s, but AutoCad R12 was coming up. In 1995, people still used AutoCad v2.5, hanging on for dear life, but the mainstream was using Windows 3.1 and AutoCad R12. AutoCad R13 was struggling and NT 4 is in Beta, AutoCad R14 is not in Alpha yet, and Windows 95 has really hit the mainstream, as has NT. Pentiums and multiple pentiums are in the mainstream and P6s or pentium pros are at early adoptive stages. Next year multiple pentiums will be in mainstream, multiple P6s will be in the early adoptive stage. We will have NT 4.0 and Windows 97 available by the end of the year and probably see AutoCad R14 Alpha emerging, as well as objective Microstation. Four years from now, the P7 and P8 will be in the mainstream and technology we don't know about will be at the leading edge. We will have NT 5.0 on our desks, and a unified version of Windows 95 and NT will be available. Got that!

We will probably have modularized software, meaning you will have to buy only what you need rather than buying large complex packages. We will also have automated system management. You are going to be able to buy and download software and pay for it as you use it. Hardware and software prices will drop by 50%. Data will be a big growth market. As a need for expansion hits Parametric Technology, after the mechanical design market is drained, it will start moving into the AEC market.

The workstation, as we know it, is going to continue much as we see it. We may go to dual displays. The innovation to watch for is wearable computers. There is a fascination project at MT called "things that think" where you wear your technology. Being stuck to your desk will be a thing of the past. Color monitors will dominate. Flat panel displays are going to become a significant part of future workstations, powered by a new HP Merced chip running at about 600 mhz, maybe even 1000 mhz.

As for the future of Virtual Reality (VR), it has been terribly over-hyped. It doesn't do everything everybody says it does. On the other hand, it is growing rapidly. One-third of its revenue comes from entertainment. Virtual Reality needs to get a little more realism and better performance. The concept of someone sitting at a desk wearing a VR helmet is not going to be realized by the year 2001. Video conferencing, on the other hand, is moving ahead quickly. The director of research for Hewlett-Packard argues that in the near future, you are going to able to buy little video cameras for one dollar that sit on your PC. They will not be more than a chip. In the old days, video conferencing required a special room. By the year 2000, every workstation you buy is going to have a camera with it.

What about the Internet? Nothing has caught on as fast as the World Wide Web. It is really going to significantly change what it is that architects and engineers are doing. We are going to see incredible levels of computer performance in the future. The pace of the increase in computer power is actually accelerating. The president to Silicon Graphics said that over the next decade, we will see a thousand-fold improvement in computer price, and a tremendous increase in data sharing across multiple applications and geographic areas. If you need product information from a supplier, that information is going to be directly available over the Web. You are going to be able to download a model of that component and put it into the project you are working on. The Internet is a lot more than just E-mail, and some believe it is the most significant development in the computer industry since the development of the integrated circuit. It facilitates the collaborative design we are striving for and will hopefully reduce support. We are going to use the Web, in effect, to publish project information.

There are many issues we need to look at before much of this technology becomes available, such as moving from individual productivity to enterprise productivity. We have too many people worried about how many square feet of drawings they can produce in a given day and not really looking at what this technology can do for the quality of the project. A lot of the software is still too hard to learn and a lot comes in large monolithic chunks that offer more than is needed. We use just a small portion of many of the packages we spend thousands of dollars to buy. There is too much tweaking of the systems and you still have to be a computer hacker to really get all of the pieces to work together. We must move away from this. Firms are going to have to budget to swap out top workstations at least every three years. That doesn't mean to throw them away, but pass them along to someone in the organization that doesn't need all that power and get the most for the people that can use all the power, specifically those doing rendering and realistic imagery. Today, people predominately use CAD to produce drawings. They think they are creating designs and then communication them through images. Much more is possible. People at the cutting edge o this technology are trying to facilitate design analysis and construction through collaboration and teamwork in communication. This is where the goals are today and hopefully the reality for usage will come to be a little more than that by 2001.

In the year 2001 you can expect drawings will still be with us, telecommuting will be widespread in AEC, and unnetworked CAD will be very rare. We will see many people working from home, cars, the beach, wherever. The success of CAD depends on only about 10% of users choosing the right technology and about 90% on proper management. No matter how much we have in the way of technology, unless people use it properly all its benefits could go down the drain.

So, are you ready for the future?