Dec 12, 2001 - Alias|Wavefront has announced the worldwide availability of PortfolioWall 1.5 - the award winning software that allows design teams to view, manage and make decisions on digital design work through an intuitive touchscreen interface.

First unveiled at the 2001 Siggraph exhibition in Los Angeles, PortfolioWall’s innovative 'digital corkboard' approach streamlines the design review process.

In recent years, traditional design tools such as full size clay models and full size tape drawings have been partly replaced by digital model development, which has tended to take the developing design 'out of view' of many of the design team and the design managers.

PortfolioWall attempts to address this, to get the digital modelling and rendering work 'out of the box' and within easy reach of everyone involved in the design process.

The Portfolio Wall concept emerged from a series of discussions between General Motors designers and Alias Wavefront. "Bill Buxton and his research team at Alias|Wavefront took our need for a way to effortlessly review dozens of digital images to create the PortfolioWall concept", said Brian Baker, head of GM's Corporate Brand Character Center. "We now use the PortfolioWall in many of our studios and even have it connected to our full size screen projection systems in the Corporate Brand Character Center and our Virtual Reality Lab."

For designers, PortfolioWall serves as a presentation tool that displays selected work in progress and allows entire design teams to see who is doing what. It becomes an integrated part of the design process, replacing traditional visual communication methods. Designers can refer to it and walk up to it periodically to look at the state of active projects. They can zoom into images, arrange and compare numerous images and animations, sketch on top of images and scale the images to real-size.

PortfolioWall is a decision-making tool for design managers to see daily work and to review a project's progress. It allows managers to interact with design teams and participate more fully in the design process, and even assemble impromptu presentations to senior staff.

Interacting with digital assets becomes a physical act and engages the user's mind and body, getting them more involved in the digital data and unearthing new possibilities. This "emotional computing" allows users to feel closer to the visual data. Looking at the digital design proposals becomes a casual and flexible event, not a formal, time consuming or overly technical task.

PortfolioWall 1.5 adds sketch and text annotation, the ability to launch third-party applications, and a Maya-based 3D viewing tool that uses a touchscreen interface for panning, rotating, zooming and viewing 3D models on a turntable. It also works on mouse-driven desktop computers as well as touchscreen systems. PortfolioWall 1.5 is available in stand-alone and networked versions.

Alias|Wavefront is one of the world's leading innovators of 3D graphics technology, developing software for the film and video, games, interactive media, industrial design, technical surfacing and visualization markets.

Alias|Wavefront Autostudio and SurfaceStudio dominate the field of conceptual design and modelling software for the automotive design industry, with customers such as BMW, Fiat, Ford, Honda, General Motors, Italdesign, and Renault.

Alias|Wavefront website: www.aliaswavefront.com