Geomagic has a hankering for haptics. You know them for their reverse engineering and inspection software. Now, they add 3D software and haptic control devices to their line-up giving them a very strong portfolio of engineering/manufacturing products.
Geomagic acquires Sensable
It was a mere three weeks ago that Sensable released version 12 of their Freeform design software. Now, their 3D software/haptic hardware combo can gorge itself on the magically fortified, manfucturing milk of the mighty Geomagic mama… (please send all complaints about that phrase to wtf@solidsmack.com.)
Geomagic creates software to aid in reverse engineering and inspection of parts – model comparison between scanned data and turning scanned data into usable geometry. Sensable has four types of haptic control devices used for transferring physical data to virtual, a haptic device API and two modeling applications, Freeform and ClayTools. This all gets added to the Geomagic portfolio while Sensable’s dental business remains with the company formerly known as Sensable Technologies Inc.
Obviously, the two go together. The acquisition adds force feedback devices for receiving data and 3D software for creating and working with that data. This also turns Geomagic from a software-only vendor into a hardware/software vendor. Perhaps some growing pains there, but the Sensable crew is staying on so the knowledge remains with the product.
Geomagic definitely gets an Ace in the hole on this one, positioning themselves more toward the center of the 3D software development sweetspot. My only surprise is that their first hardware move is into haptics, instead of laser-scanning. Start-ups like Matterport (that we covered last week) seem right up their alley. For all we know, they may be next.
Source: Geomagic
