Comment by zokier

It is a shame that the field is pretty undeveloped still after 20 years. Only recently there have been popping up few consumer CADs (fusion360/onshape), but those are still quite limited and of course do not satisfy free software user like me. Setting up decent physical simulations seems yet another whole endeavor even if you got your model done. There are few physics engines available, but using them seems to require fair amount of work even just for basics. Then comes the social sharong aspect that the article mentions as "Shared federated simulation environments". While I don't think that we need such fully immersive shared environment that the author envisioned, just being able to share models and simulations for exploration on the web would be nice. Being able to get nice photographic-like visualizations would be then the cherry on top this whole thing.