Real-Time 2D/3D Collaboration
First real-time collaboration in Kognitwin.
Lesson
Real-time is fun, but to take the last 20% to production is hard.
The lesson in full: While the real-time collaboration feature works and is very fun to demonstrate, to mature it requires company-level investment. Take chat for example, we could chat without storing any messages and had a ‘default facility’ channel only, which is nowhere near a production-grade chat system.
What it is
Live collaboration in 2D, 3D and Chat in Kognitwin. The inspiration came from two places: the need to support ‘remote operation’ use-cases in heavy asset industries where teams are distributed across multiple locations and time zones, and consumer-grade collaboration tools like Figma and Google Docs. This was the first time Kognitwin supported real-time multi-user collaboration, where multiple users could see each other’s presence, cursors, annotations, etc. in both 2D and 3D space. Built on top of a WebSocket-based architecture with different channels for various data sources, with a backend supporting load broadcasting to multiple clusters/regions around the world. This was NOT comparable with products like Figma and other Chat applications. The support was minimal and targeted for specific use-cases, but it worked and we learned a lot from building it.
Tools and technologies
WebSocket · Presence · Multi-Region Broadcasting
Lineage
Built on lessons from Digital Twin Platform, First Global Twin Deployment.
Lessons carried into Explorable Graph Canvas, Video Calls in XR, Chat and Messaging Backbone.