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ShapeDiver In 2019: What We’re Building For You!

January 11, 2019 by Mathias Hoebinger

Hi! My name is Mathias and I'm CEO at ShapeDiver. Coming out of an exciting, productive and successful year of 2018, I’d like to take the opportunity and update all of you on what’s been happening behind the scenes over the last months here at ShapeDiver, and about the updates and new features you can expect in the new year.

A Brand New Website And App

First, and most obvious to our regular visitors, we have upgraded shapediver.com to an all-new design. Even more importantly, the website’s content has been completely rewritten. We think it now explains much better how you can use ShapeDiver to build powerful 3D configurators for any platform.

There’s dedicated sections for business owners, product designers and web developers. Also, we have a completely new documentation about all things ShapeDiver. It covers our Grasshopper plugin, our online app and our upgraded 3D viewer with its brand new API.

In the course of this update, we have decided to award our ShapeDiver Web App its own domain at app.shapediver.com. It makes it easier for all of our power users to dive right into managing their models and uploading new ones.


Most of the upgrades to the app have been under the hood so far but they will make it much easier for us to roll out exciting new features such as proper model usage statistics and fine grained model settings.

A New Viewer (With Much Better Rendering Quality)

After cutting our teeth in the configurator business in 2017, we started last year with a huge amount of valuable feedback from our clients, our own project engineers and sales team.

One main point of concern was our WebGL based 3D viewer. We realized it didn’t fully deliver the rendering quality that many of our clients expected. This became a priority for industries where the visual quality of the product is crucial, like jewelry and furniture. Also, the feedback we received contained a lot of new ideas on how to improve the viewer’s “remote control” via its Javascript API.

In the end we decided to completely rewrite the whole viewer to make it more flexible, powerful and future proof for all of our clients. After proving itself in many commercial configurator projects throughout 2018, the new viewer is making its debut on the new platform with the current update. You can check out its rendering capabilities in this material demo embedded below.

Planned: Gemstone Rendering

To further improve our appeal to jewelers around the world, we are currently testing new shaders for gemstone rendering. We’re pretty happy with our internal results which we will share in a blog post very soon. For anyone interested, we're planning to roll these options out to our Grasshopper plugin and our API by the end of Q1 2019.

Enterprise Accounts With Dedicated Server Power

Several of our new clients in 2018 are businesses for whom the protection of their intellectual property is of particular concern. Those clients have specific security related policies in place regarding the storage and access of sensitive data.

To accommodate these clients we have created a new type of ShapeDiver subscription package which includes dedicated geometry processing servers and databases. In those systems, both model management and viewing access can be individually configured. On demand, we can add OAuth authentication as well as a separate management platform to such accounts.

Planned: Advanced Model Management

Many of our clients use our services to run multiple configurators, and some of our partners manage configurators for several of their clients. We want to make it easier to review information about who interacted with your models and what they did. Therefore, we are about to release an advanced new statistics module to app.shapediver.com in the first quarter of 2019.

Additional new management modules are planned for later in the year. We’d be very interested in hearing from you about which new features you would like to see. Please let us know in our forum!

Planned: Augmented Reality

The most important new feature we are working on in 2019 is to bring our unique approach to 3D visualization to product configurators using AR on mobile devices. We are currently evaluating several different approaches, which is a challenging topic given the extremely short development cycles of this technology. But we’re confident that we can show you a first glimpse of what we’re cooking before the summer break.

We’re Growing (And Hiring!)

We have been extremely lucky to find some great new members for our ShapeDiver team here in Vienna in 2018. Welcome again, Luka and Edwin!


We hope to continue adding talent to our ranks in the new year. If you like what we do and are interested in working in a friendly and focused team in one of the most livable cities on the planet, please check our job postings!

Meet Us In Helsinki

Are you visiting the Rhino User Meeting in Helsinki?I encourage you to find us at our booth during one of the coffee breaks.

And to everyone else, on behalf of the entire ShapeDiver team I wish all of you a great start into 2019!

Mathias is a co-founder and the CEO of ShapeDiver.

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