It's been awhile since we posted about CtrlWiz. In fact, it's been over a year since we announced the first release of CtrlWiz. When you work for a large company things take longer, you have to deal with internal departments, and get approval to do things. These things aren't easy, especially when the company is great at building buildings, not tech products.
The advantage, however, of being a builder, is we are our own ideal customer. Robins & Morton has a quickly growing VDC department led by David Pratt, and David has done the rarely done: created an internal VDC department that generates profit and is loved by project teams and clients.
The advantage of being a builder first, is we are our own ideal customer.
Not only is our VDC department instrumental in CtrlWiz's success, more can be attributed to Robins & Morton's superintendents. Robert Grady, Robins & Morton's Senior MEP Manager, and the first voice you hear in our product video that say's "This thing is bad ass" was the initial inspiration for CtrlWiz. Robert was the MEP Superintendent for our MUSC project at the time. We built CtrlWiz for people like him, field guys who don't spend hundreds of hours in BIM, who need to just pick it up and go.
CtrlWiz has been a success, with over 1,000 licenses sold and growing, it made sense to double down on our investment and make it more powerful for users. In addition to supporting Navisworks 2021, the latest release has some key improvements:
Select, hide, & measure
The biggest new feature is the new on-screen target. Just like a video game, put something in the target, Press A, it blows up errrr... it get selected. We've added some other commands to let you hide, deselect etc. Check out the controller map.
The other big command you now have is the measure between. Select 2 objects, hit the RB trigger, you now know the distance between them.
Feedback
Feedback is huge. It's important for any tech product. As a product manager I have my own idea of how I think CtrlWiz should work, but it turns out I'm a snowflake just like everyone else. Instead of building from the gut, we created an awesome feedback portal (which we migrated from Zendesk). Its now super easy to create a feature request, vote on existing feature request, see a live roadmap, and get notified when the features that are important to you.
Go to feedback.ctrlwiz.com to contribute
New License server
We've also implemented a new license server that gives you greater flexibility. You can now deactivate your license and activate it on a new computer. Your license is now tied to your email, not your Autodesk ID.
Our roadmap
Our roadmap is full of requests from our users. There are 2 updates that I'm particularly excited about.
First, is the ability to change modes: invert the y-axis, drone mode, 3rd person, gravity, etc.
Second, is full custom mapping. Navisworks API is fairly limited, but we'll have tons of controls that you can add and map to any button.
We're really excited about this release and the one to come. Thanks for your patience and support.
