OpenLD
OpenLD is a collaborative CAD system for creating lighting designs. It allows multiple people to work on a CAD document simultaneously using live-editing functionality, which allows lighting designers to more easily collaborate with other team members when working on a design. It was created as my final year project at the University of Warwick, and was the subject of my dissertation, which covered the design, implementation, and evaluation of the system, which was awarded a first class mark.
Lighting design is the process of arranging lights to enhance performances such as concerts or plays. During my work with the university technical theatre society, I realised a problem with the existing tools that lighting designers were using - they do not allow easy collaboration. Creating a design often requires collaboration with other team members and specialists in areas such as rigging or electrical, however existing solutions do not easily permit this. With existing solutions, designs are created offline on the designer’s computer, and so are not easily accessible by others on-demand. This means that multiple people cannot work on a drawing simultaneously: they must instead wait to receive a copy from the designer in order to contribute to it.
OpenLD addresses these problems by providing a Google Docs style collaborative editor for lighting designs. This allows the drawing to be shared and contributed to by an unlimited number of people on-demand, requiring only an internet connection and web browser. OpenLD also streamlines the user interface compared to existing solutions, which are notoriously difficult to master due to the complexity of their user interface. OpenLD seeks to improve this by utilising common design patterns, ensuring UI controls are well-sized and grouped, and ensuring that controls to interact with the drawing are visible, and not hidden inside menu systems.
OpenLD is written using C# and JavaScript, consisting of an ASP.NET Core back-end and React front-end. This was by far the biggest project I’d undertaken so far, so it was a huge challenge, especially when implementing the edit synchronisation features. This was my first major project using ASP.NET Core and React, so this improved my experience and confidence with both significantly. I also used Docker to containerise the system for easy development and deployment by ensuring a consistent environment with all dependencies properly configured and installed.
The source code for OpenLD is available on my GitHub. This project is not actively maintained, so the live demo is no longer available.
Screenshots of the system, an exported drawing, and related materials are shown below.
