Viewpoint Arena

Viewpoint Arena is a self-hosted room for reviewing a 3D model together. A small team opens the same model, points at parts, follows each other's view and talks it through; the meeting is transcribed and turned into risk, action and rationale cards on your own hardware.

It runs with Docker on one machine: one install script, no cloud accounts.

Status: 0.1.0 preview. Accounts, variants and backups are new, so expect rough edges. See CHANGELOG.md for what is in it and its known limits.

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Install it yourself

Follow docs/INSTALL.md: one installer (install.sh), about 15 minutes. It sets up the app, the live room server, the database and local meeting capture with Docker Compose.

Tested on Windows 11 with WSL2 and Docker Desktop; Linux works the same way.

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What it does

Review a live 3D model

• Import GLB, glTF, OBJ, FBX, STL, STEP, IGES or BREP files. STEP, IGES and BREP go through OpenCascade compiled to WebAssembly, in the browser.
• Point at parts, pin comments to them, and see where everyone is looking.
• Sessions and variants. Each meeting is a session on a review's main line. Explore a variant from any session, move parts with undo, then adopt it into the main line or drop it; the reasons are kept either way.

Meeting capture on your own hardware

• The browser records the meeting in short clips and sends them to the install. Whisper transcribes them and a local model through Ollama (qwen2.5:7b by default) turns them into cards:
  • ⚠️ Risks: failure points, interferences, material concerns.
  • 🛡️ Rationale: why a design decision was made.
  • ✅ Actions: tasks with an assignee and a due date.
• Clicking a card opens its record: priority, status, assignees, mitigations.
• An action tracker follows open actions across sessions and reviews, and each meeting gets minutes.
• Nothing leaves the machine in a default install. OpenAI or Anthropic can be chosen instead in the admin console.

Meet in the room

• Video calls in the Boardroom view, with a bundled TURN relay.
• Lobby with saved reviews, previews and a live 3D look inside each one.
• Sign-in options: no accounts (optional front-door password), accounts on the install, or company single sign-on (Entra ID, Google, Keycloak). Hosts admit people into rooms.
• Admin console: reviews, people, AI provider settings, label fields and an activity record.
• Automatic daily backups with a restore script.
• Connectors for Onshape, Teamcenter and Microsoft Teams/SharePoint notifications (bring your own accounts).

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Ways to look at the model

🔗 Lead and follow

• Leading: Press the Lead button. Everyone in the room starts following your view, and a badge above the dock shows who is following. When the last follower leaves, you drop back to free view.
• Following: Dragging the camera does not leave the follow. You can look around, and about two seconds after you let go your view eases back to the leader's. The pill at the top says so. Only Free view actually leaves.
• Free view orbits the model itself, including right after you stop following someone.

🕷️ Split screen

• The left half stays your own free view; the right half shows exactly what another person in the room is looking at, so you can check what a colleague means without losing your own place.
• It opens on the first other participant; pick someone else from the name badge over the right half.

🧠 AI-guided focus

• The camera drifts to frame the area most people are looking at. Drag to take over; it gently takes control back after a short delay. A slider overlay weights some people more than others.

🤖 Demo agents

• Four scripted agents can be switched on with the AGENTS toggle in the room (bottom left) to demonstrate the view modes without other people. They are off by default. Their visual aids show what each one sees (view cones) and where it is looking. Click an agent to jump into its view.

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Controls

• Orbit: Left Click + Drag
• Pan: Right Click + Drag (or Shift + Left Click)
• Zoom: Scroll Wheel

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Configuration

Viewpoint Arena uses a two-layer configuration system:

1. viewpoint.config.ts (primary interface) — declares which connector providers are active (PLM, capture, TURN, database, notifications, model import) and their non-secret settings (base URLs, model names, feature flags). See viewpoint.config.example.ts for a template.
2. .env (credential store) — holds the secret values that the config file references by environment-variable name. Copy .env.example as a starting point; it documents every variable, grouped by connector, with server-only vs. public labels.

The browser never imports the config file directly. It fetches the non-secret subset at runtime from GET /api/public-config, so a single built artifact works against any deployment's config.

Hosts without a config file (Vercel, other serverless hosts). The config file is git-ignored, so a deploy from git does not have it. Put the same settings in the VIEWPOINT_CONFIG environment variable instead, as JSON:

npm run config:json      # prints your viewpoint.config.ts as one line of JSON

Paste the output into VIEWPOINT_CONFIG in the host's environment settings, next to the secrets it names. It holds no secrets itself (the config only names the variables that do), and it goes through the same validation as the file. When both exist, the variable wins and the server logs that once. GET /api/health reports which one was used (configSource).

Capping what cloud AI capture can spend. With the OpenAI or Anthropic capture options, every extraction is a paid API call. The app bounds each single call (transcript size and answer length), and the self-hosted proxy limits each address to 30 capture requests a minute, but nothing in the app caps the total. Set that ceiling where it cannot be bypassed: a monthly budget on the API key's project (OpenAI) or a spend limit on its workspace (Anthropic). On Vercel, where the self-hosted proxy is absent, add a rate limit rule for /api/capture/ in the project's Firewall settings as well.

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Tech stack

• React 19, React Three Fiber (three.js), Zustand, Tailwind CSS
• PartyKit for live rooms (presence, follow and admission)
• Supabase / Postgres for reviews, accounts and records
• Whisper and Ollama in a Python capture service
• occt-import-js (OpenCascade, WebAssembly) for STEP, IGES and BREP import; see THIRD_PARTY.md

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Contributing, security and license

• CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to build and test it.
• Report vulnerabilities privately; see SECURITY.md.
• Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.