Communicating and Sharing our 3D Designs

I remember back in the late 90s, there was a huge push to transition companies from 2D to 3D. Believe it or not, there is still quite a bit of buzz about it. Probably has to do with the fact that there are 4 million+ 2D AutoCAD seats out there. So, companies like Inventor, SolidWorks and Solid Edge are slugging it out to convert companies to 3D. Perhaps I am spoiled, but I can't imagine designing anyting mechanical in 2D. 3D, seems to becoming the accepted standard. I think the creation of the "mid-range" market (SW, Inventor & SE) really exposed companies to the idea of 3D. Prior to 1995, a seat of Pro/e was $20k and required a machine that was equally priced to drive. SW exploded on the market and totally changed the playing field. One "wow" factor that SW used in the late 90s (and widely used today) is "edrawings". It is a standalone viewer that provides a means to share, mark up and view models in 3D. One of the cool things they did was allow users to package up the viewer and model and send it to someone. This bypassed the need to have to download the viewer on the other end. Very cool for the time, however, email servers tend to strip off the "*.exe" these days. As you can imagine, every other CAD vendor jumped on the bandwagon and provided their own viewer. I recently tested out Autodesk's version called, Design Review. I really like their interface. Check out some of the cool navigation tools in the model window.
Things have come even further. We now want the ability to share our simulation results with the world. Check out the video below. It is a 3D viewer for CFD results. It can act as a standalone application or can be embedded inside a power point presentation. So, imagine presenting results to a team of engineers, or even better, non-engineers and have the ability to pan, zoom, rotate and animate your results. Cool stuff...