The story
3DVIA was formed in 2007 by Dassault Systèmes with the mission of democratizing 3D technology for use by consumer markets, new media, and non-engineering professional markets. The brand group was created through the collection of several internal projects and the earlier acquisition of Virtools, a gaming engine and prototyping application.
In 2007, 3dvia.com (renamed from teapotters.com) was released, and it focused on creating a social network and content community for 3D artists and modelers. The site allowed users to upload 3D content in numerous 3D formats and then interactively view them through a web-browser. Later in 2007, the company released a free 3D modeling application called 3DVIA Shape. It was targeted at consumers and used in partnership with the Microsoft Virtual Earth program. The Microsoft Virtual Earth Shape version of the product was released as the official 3D modeling application for Microsoft's 3D globe application.
The 3DVIA brand was further expanded in 2007 through the acquisition of Seemage. Rebranded as 3DVIA Composer, the Seemage product line focused on re-purposing existing product design data for the creation of 2D and 3D product communications including technical illustrations, 3D animations, and interactive online applications.
3DVIA moved into the mobile market in 2008 with the release of 3DVIA Mobile, one of the first 3D model viewers on iOS. 3DVIA Mobile allowed users to view 3D models in an interactive view on an Apple iPhone and connected them to their content hosted on 3DVIA.com.
In early 2009, 3DVIA released 3DVIA Virtools Version 5, they offered a development environment to create 3D real-time applications and related services, targeted at system integrators, game studios and corporate end-users.
The brand extended its reach into the indie-game market with the release of a free real-time game engine called 3DVIA Studio in March 2010. The product game users the ability to create and publish interactive 3D games and experiences to Facebook and 3dvia.com. It also allowed users to purchase content for use in their projects from the 3DVIA Market, an eCommerce service for 3D content, launched at the same time on 3dvia.com.
In June 2011, 3DVIA Hosting, a 3D file sharing service, was released.
From Wikipedia’s article on 3dvia, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3