Digital Twin to Virtual Reality: Hololight Space Meets CADMATIC eShare

Engineering teams invest significant effort building accurate 3D models. Yet most reviews still happen on flat screens, in meeting rooms, with teams trying to interpret complex geometry from 2D projections. Clash detection gets missed. Design errors surface late. Field teams encounter surprises that should have been caught weeks earlier.

Hololight Space and CADMATIC eShare change that dynamic. Together, they let engineering teams step inside their models — in full virtual reality — while staying connected to the live data and documentation that give those models meaning.

What Is Hololight Space?

Hololight Space is an enterprise VR application for reviewing, analyzing, and collaborating on large-scale 3D models. It is built on Hololight's streaming technology, which means the heavy rendering work happens on a PC, laptop, or server, not inside the headset. The result is high-fidelity visualization on lightweight VR hardware, without the typical constraints of standalone devices.

Hololight Space supports a range of industry-standard 3D file formats and connects to external data systems via browser integration, allowing VR users to access and update model metadata without leaving the virtual environment.

Deployment options:

• ■  Standalone streaming app: runs directly on a PC, laptop, or on-premises server
• ■  Hololight Hub: Hololight's managed platform, available as cloud or on-premises deployment, for organizations that want centralized administration, user management, and scalable multi-user sessions

Whether a team is running sessions in a single facility or rolling out VR review capability across multiple sites, both deployment modes are available without changes to the underlying application.

What Is CADMATIC eShare?

CADMATIC eShare is a web-based digital twin platform used across shipbuilding, offshore, industrial plant, and process engineering. It consolidates 3D models, engineering documents, P&IDs, metadata, and project data into a single browser-accessible environment — without requiring CAD tools on the client side.

eShare acts as the single source of truth for a project. Engineers, project managers, site teams, and owner-operators can all access the same model and data in real time, view status information overlaid on 3D geometry, link documents to specific model objects, and track issues and progress throughout the project lifecycle.

CADMATIC eShare is used by major companies in shipbuilding (Meyer Werft, Damen, Tsuneishi), industrial plant engineering (Fortum, Bonatti, Sumitomo SHI FW), and related sectors. Its combination of web accessibility, data integration, and 3D visualization has made it a foundational tool for digital twin workflows in capital-intensive industries.

How the Workflow Works

The integration between Hololight Space and CADMATIC eShare is built around a straightforward data pipeline that requires no custom export steps or manual conversion.

Step 1: Navisworks Import into CADMATIC eShare Project teams import their Navisworks (.nwd/.nwc) files into CADMATIC eShare. This is the standard handoff format from most engineering and design workflows, and eShare's import pipeline accepts it directly.

Step 2: Automatic Conversion to CADMATIC 3D Format eShare automatically converts the imported Navisworks file into CADMATIC's native 3D format. This conversion preserves model geometry, object hierarchy, and attached metadata — the component attributes, tag numbers, status fields, and linked documentation that make the model useful beyond pure geometry.

Step 3: Hololight Space Reads the File Hololight Space natively reads the CADMATIC 3D file format. Once the file is available on the deployment target — whether a local server or Hololight Hub — users can load the model directly into the VR session. No intermediate exports. No manual conversion steps.

Step 4: Browser Integration — VR and eShare Side by Side While working inside the VR session, Hololight Space's built-in browser integration displays the CADMATIC eShare interface alongside the 3D model. Users can select a component in VR and immediately see the corresponding object in eShare — with all linked documents, metadata, and status information visible. The workflow runs in both directions: navigate eShare and the VR camera follows.

Step 5: Live Metadata Updates During the VR session, users can update object metadata directly — status values, inspection notes, review flags, and similar fields — through the eShare interface. These updates are written back to eShare in real time and are immediately visible to any other user accessing the project data, whether they are in VR or working on a standard desktop.

Use Cases

Design Review in VR

Design review meetings traditionally rely on screen sharing and 2D drawings. In Hololight Space, the entire project team — engineers, architects, construction managers, client representatives — can walk through the model together in VR, at 1:1 scale. Spatial relationships that are ambiguous on screen become immediately clear when experienced in three dimensions.

Multiple users can join the same VR session simultaneously, each with their own headset, moving independently through the model while sharing the same virtual space. Desktop users can join the same session from their standard workstations, making it possible to include team members who do not have VR headsets.

Quality Control and Inspection

Quality control workflows benefit directly from the combination of spatial VR review and live eShare data. An inspector working in VR can walk through a section of a vessel or plant, select components, check their installation status against eShare data, and flag issues — all within the same session. The updated status is immediately visible in eShare for the broader project team.

This tightens the feedback loop between field observation and project data, reducing the lag between issue detection and documentation.

Measurements and Dimensional Verification

Hololight Space supports in-VR measurements, allowing users to verify clearances, check installation dimensions, and identify tight spaces that may cause access problems during maintenance or construction. Measurement results can be noted directly through the eShare interface and attached to the relevant model objects.

Clash Detection and Interference Resolution

Walking a model in VR at true scale exposes spatial conflicts that automated clash detection algorithms may flag as low-priority but that are operationally significant. A pipe running through a maintenance access route, a cable tray that blocks an inspection hatch, or a piece of equipment that cannot be removed without disassembling adjacent structure — these issues are immediately obvious in VR and can be resolved collaboratively in the same session.

Collaboration Between VR and Desktop Users

Hololight Space supports mixed sessions where VR users and desktop users share the same model simultaneously. A client representative on a desktop in another city can follow a VR walkthrough led by the project team, see the same view, and interact with the eShare data in real time. This eliminates the need to travel for design review milestones without losing the spatial fidelity that makes VR review valuable.

The Value for Engineering and Industrial Companies

The combination of Hololight Space and CADMATIC eShare addresses the core problem in industrial design review: the gap between where information lives (in data systems) and where decisions get made (in spatial context).

Earlier error detection. Issues found in VR during the design phase cost a fraction of what they cost to fix during construction or after commissioning. Spatial conflicts, access problems, and installation sequence issues that are easy to miss on screen become obvious at 1:1 scale in VR.

Faster quality checks. Inspectors and reviewers can cover more ground in a structured VR walkthrough than in a conventional screen-based review. The ability to update eShare data in the same session eliminates the separate documentation step.

Fewer surprises on site. Construction teams that have walked the model in VR before beginning fieldwork arrive with better spatial understanding of what they are building. This reduces rework and shortens the learning curve on complex assemblies.

Cost savings across the project lifecycle. The European cost-of-change curve is consistent across industries: a design change costs roughly 1x to address in design, 10x in construction, and 100x after commissioning. VR-based review moves more issues earlier. The data supports it, and the teams that use it see it directly.

Connected decisions. Because Hololight Space's metadata updates flow back to eShare in real time, VR sessions generate structured project data rather than meeting notes. Every flag, status update, and annotation is immediately part of the project record.

Infrastructure and Setup

Hololight Space is designed to fit into existing IT infrastructure without requiring dedicated hardware beyond the rendering workstation and VR headsets.

Standalone deployment runs on any capable PC or laptop. The Hololight Space application handles streaming to connected headsets. For teams that want a shared server rather than per-machine installations, an on-premises server can host the streaming application and serve multiple concurrent users.

Hololight Hub is the managed deployment option. It provides centralized user management, session administration, and scalable multi-user support. Hub can be deployed as a cloud instance or within a customer's own on-premises infrastructure, depending on data sovereignty and security requirements. For industries with strict data classification requirements — offshore, defense, critical infrastructure — the on-premises Hub option keeps all model data and session data within the customer's environment.

Supported VR headsets include Meta Quest 3, Apple Vision Pro, HTC Vive, and other OpenXR-compatible devices. Hardware requirements for the rendering host depend on model size and target visual quality; Hololight provides configuration guidance as part of the onboarding process.

Integration with CADMATIC eShare requires access to the CADMATIC 3D files produced by eShare's conversion pipeline. No additional connectors or middleware are required.

Ready to See It in Action?

If your team works with CADMATIC eShare and is exploring VR-based review workflows, Hololight Space is ready to connect.

Request a call to discuss your specific project environment, deployment requirements, and use cases. We offer structured trials that let your team evaluate the integration with your own model data before committing to a full rollout.