Physna to develop an analogue of Google to search for 3D models
Article originally appeared on Top 3D shop’s Medium.com blog
An advanced search engine will be able to select search results not only by tags, keywords, names and descriptions, but also by geometric parameters — similar to how Google searches through pictures.
Startup Physna was founded in 2015 by astrophysicist and lawyer Paul Powers. The other day, the company completed the investment round, raising $ 6.9 million. The main financial partner was Drive Capital, led by venture capitalist Mark Kwamm. Prior to its founding, Drive Capital Mark was a partner in Sequoia Capital, a venture capital company that made a fortune with successful investments in technology startups, whose total capitalization is currently estimated at almost one and a half trillion dollars. Two American giants Apple and Google are also on this list. Now Kwamm hopes to hit a new jackpot on another search engine, but with an emphasis on 3D.
“We are very excited for the opportunity to invest in Physna,” states Drive Capital Partner Mark Kvamme. “We believe what Paul and his team are doing in search has the potential to revolutionize the workflows of engineers around the world.”
There are already enough search engines and databases of 3D models, but all of them rely mainly on text identifiers — descriptions, tags, keywords, catalog sections and the like. What exactly is contained in the issue, you will not know until you check the cherished STL-ku. In an extreme case, you can try to find interesting models for visual search, available in the same Google, but when it comes to development work and production, this is not enough.
Physna, on the other hand, intends to increase the accuracy of search results by adding geometric analysis. In other words, the system breaks down 3D models into composite blocks and looks for matches at this more basic level, that is, it actually compares the geometry of 3D models, looking for similar patterns. The level of similarity can be set in the settings, by default the filter is set to 95%. By the way, here lies the key to the name of the company: Physna is a stylized abbreviation for Physical DNA, that is, “physical DNA”. Of course, geometric analysis will not be the only tool, since the system allows you to set various conditional search parameters, such as cost, materials, tolerances, keywords, compliance with certain standards and others, and others.
Originally published at https://medium.com on November 18, 2019.
