I had the pleasure of having a quick chat with Hugo Falgarone, the founder and CEO of SkyReal, a startup offering CAD models visualization in VR.
SkyReal is a French company that started as a project inside Airbus, and then evolved into a separate company. Its mission is to help enterprise companies, especially the ones working on manufacturing big and complex products like planes, ships and such. Using SkyReal, the company is able to take the CAD design of the product and transform it on the fly in a multiplayer solution inside Unreal Engine. This lets various engineers, even from different countries, meet inside VR and explore the model from the inside, identifying all its possible issues and discussing the features that could be modified. Using VR, it is so possible to improve the design of the product already at design stage, making it smoother the transition to the physical prototyping and the production.
As with many other VR solution for the enteprise, this means saving money and time (that is money, too) for the customers, because there is no more the need to print chalk prototypes, to pay travels for the engineers to meet, and so on.
Here you are my quick chat with Mr. Falgarone about this interesting product.
Hello Hugo, introduce yourself to my readers!
Hi, My name is Hugo, I’m the founder of SkyReal. My background is mechanical engineering and I have been working in Airbus for 17 years as an Innovation expert. This is where I discovered my passion to develop new digital tools for engineers but also understand how challenging it could be to introduce new digital solutions in business and to change people’s way of working within an organization.
Can you tell us what is SkyReal and what are its main features?
SkyReal is a VR solution dedicated to Engineering operations to perform efficient design reviews. It helps to drastically shorten the design cycle as designers can share their project with all stakeholders (customers, Chief Engineer, partners, etc) and identify technical issues at an early stage.
Its main feature is to automatically generate VR experiences from CAD files, and offer useful features to analyze the product, to navigate and manipulate.
What is the history of this project?
This project started in Airbus Innovation as an internal research project aimed at learning VR technologies and understanding how it could benefit to aircraft design operations. In 2012, Airbus decided to use and deploy our project on the design office of the program A350 XWB and we started to learn how much benefit it could be.
In 2018, the technology was spun off from Airbus to create SkyReal and Go to market.
Why visualization of CAD models is so important for companies?
Visualizing CAD models is critical for companies during the development of a project as it is necessary to validate project progress and to check how the project will answer to customer requirements.
Traditionally, some companies can manufacture and build 1:1 scale prototypes to see and touch draft products. But, these prototypes are very costly and can hardly be modified. Some companies can’t even afford to build prototype due to the project size (aircraft, shipbuilding, etc), and VR experience becomes the only way to experience scale 1 prototype.
What are your typical customers?
Our typical customer is Engineers in charge of a project in development, and they are using SkyReal to validate how their new design product will be operated (assemble, use, maintain, …). This typical customer is a CAD designer and he’s regularly using SkyReal to check how the model goes but also to show his deliverable to his chief Engineer or his customer.
How do you usually find your customers?
We actually started from our existing network in the aerospace ecosystem. We are now a proud member of the GIFAS (French aerospace industries cluster), which definitely helps us develop our sound brand. In parallel, we continue prospecting to penetrate new verticals such as naval, defence or automotive industries. We have a historical customer based in Norway which actually use SkyReal for shipbuilding operations. Their RETEX is great, and this reinforces our belief that SkyReal can be extremely powerful across all industries.
Have you some stats on what kind of advantage have the various companies using your product ?
Using SkyReal enables end-user to save up to 40% of time on product development cycle.
Tell us about a difficulty you had with SkyReal and how you solved it
SkyReal generates VR experience from CAD files, but we never know how much complex CAD files created by some customers can be. We had some issues because of customers using CAD systems in specific ways and we had to quickly analyze the issue and find a solution to make it compatible.
What is your suggestion for the people that want to make your same job?
It’s a fabulous opportunity if you strongly believe that digital transformation is ongoing in the industry, and you want to contribute to this revolution.
Games vs Enterprise. What are the pros and cons of choosing one of the two roads when someone wants to work in VR?
Working for Games, is creating fun and beautiful experience.
Working for Enterprise, is developing useful and robust tool for engineers.
Something else to add to this interview?
It’s always a big pleasure to see a customer discovering its own product through the new way we are offering in VR.
(Header image by Skyreal)