CADglasses is a Business Idea developed by me, Barnabás Szászi, and Endre Varga for our Entrepreneurship class at AIT-Budapest. During the class, we developed the strategy for CADglasses sales and marketing by creating marketing messages for Pioneers, Visionaries, and Pragmatists (3 of 5 tiers of the Technology Adoption Cycle, according to “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey A. Moore). We also presented a Business plan on CADglasses on the last day of our Entrepreneurship class. CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. 

The Product

Problem: Imperfect and slow process of implementation of CAD designs

Well-known professional architects usually spend enormous amounts of time making graphical CAD illustrations of their building designs. But many architects still have to sometimes manually and routinely ensure that disparities between the field implementation and the building CAD designs are eliminated. However, many mistakes in the field implementation still go unnoticed until the building is inhabited. This could have adverse effects on the financial and legal prospects of some architects if the mistakes are discerning. As a result, the architect spends enormous amounts of time trying to make sure that there are not so many mistakes in the implementation of his CAD designs. But yet there’s no means or tool that the architect can use to verify that the entire building design has been wholly and perfectly implemented on ground.

Solution: Focus on CAD designs; implement faster and perfectly with CADglasses

Instead of spending enormous amounts of time making sure that his/her computer designs conform to the field implementation, the architect can use CADglasses to check for field mistakes in augmented reality. CADglasses will aid the architect not only to identify the mistakes quicker but to also implement his CAD designs on field much faster. At the end of the field implementation, the architect can use CADglasses to prove to his/her clients that there are absolutely no mistakes in the field implementation. In other words, CADglasses can be used to audit the ground implementation, therefore, improving the architect’s financial and legal prospects.

CADglasses is state-of-the-art software for viewing Computer Aided Designs in Augmented Reality on Google Project X glasses. It is targeted towards professional architects and Engineers as a productivity tool to:

• Identify mistakes during and after the implementation of their CAD building designs
• Chronicle the progress of the field implementation
• From any particular position, view different angles of future construction
• Make it easier to view, compare, and contrast past, present, and future construction models. For example, the architect might want to compare design of 1 year ago to design of 1 week ago easily without going through a lot of papers and CADs

CADglasses can be used to view CAD designs in augmented reality in any CAD format including:

• CAD data exchange format
• ArchiCAD library format
• AutoCAD DXF

It works as follows:

1. The CAD Designer (Architect, Engineer) makes a CAD using any CAD software (ArchiCAD, AutoCAD, for example).
2. The CAD is transferred into the CADglasses product.
3. The Designer can now view his design in augmented reality (in different dimensions, size, and time – past, present, and future). Augmented reality superimposes the CAD designs on the current view of the Designer.

There are two versions of CADglasses:

• CADglassesBASIC is a visualization tool with minimal augmented reality features useful for professional architects and designers, urban planners, industrial engineers, civil engineers and real estate agents; and
• CADglassesPRO has more specialized augmented reality features and more sophisticated GPS and GIS systems that help the professionals identify mistakes in the field implementations. The PRO version is mainly targeted towards architects, real-estate surveyors, Urban planners, and Industrial Engineers. It would be sold at a higher price than the basic version of CADglasses

Overall, our business idea was received well by our classmates and our Professor. The only problem with this idea is the risk of planning on creating a product (CADglasses) contingent on another (Google Project X glasses) that is not yet available in the market.