Blog

I recently attended the Collision conference in New Orleans, Louisiana earlier this month. For those not familiar with the event, it’s a massive meetup where hundreds of start-up companies have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to dozens of venture capitalists and thousands of other attendees.

A while ago, I wrote about a scalable pipeline for processing point clouds. While the text gave an overview of what such a pipeline might look like, it was quite abstract. This time, instead of hand-waving on a very high level, I’m going to present some actual results.

Architecture, much like art itself, has gone through waves of style evolutions since the days when buildings shifted from being simply for shelter and started to take on a personality of their own. Architects will design a building with a specific look in mind for a myriad of reasons, including to fit the character of the new owners, to convey a...

Transitioning High End Visual Experiences from Video Games and Film into the AEC Industry In 1972, Atari released Pong and it took the world by storm. It was a simple game of two lines batting a dot back and forth on a screen. It was easy and it was fun. In no time, a highly competitive video game market emerged where publishers pushed technology...

Everyone knows collaboration is necessary for teams to reach an agreement in their mutual goals and to complete projects on schedule.  However, there are many possible barriers that can obscure a team’s path towards productivity and alignment. This usually stems from a lack of communication processes put into place, or not having the time to...

When we started working on Pryzm, our application for viewing 3d content stored in our cloud, we faced a bit of a dilemma. Umbra has over a decade's worth of experience developing middleware for a dizzying array of platforms, but not nearly as much experience in developing multi-platform user-facing applications. We wanted to develop a 3D viewer...

As technological innovation continues to advance, we are shifting the fundamental way we want to interact with the information around us; we are no longer focused on screens but looking up to have technology blend into our daily lives more naturally. Augmented Reality brings elements of the virtual world into our world thus enhancing the things we...

Cave paintings are proof that prehistoric people used to draw pictures; even though we may never truly know the reasons behind them, we can speculate it was a form of communication. It might look primitive to us, but for them a cave wall full of drawings must've been a mind-blowing experience. Unlike us, they didn't live in a world of pictures.

In the grand scheme of things, Umbra is a productivity tool and our goal is to help our customers work more efficiently. We respect our customers' time and strive to not keep them waiting, as doing so would be counterproductive to our goal. Umbra would simply not be useful if it weren't so snappy!