AWS Spatial Computing Blog

Open-Source Launch: Visual Asset Management System Solution

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Introduction:

Today, we are excited to announce the open-source launch of Visual Asset Management System (VAMS) solution. VAMS enables organizations to store, transform, and view their 3D assets in the cloud. Customers can integrate with VAMS using any capabilities of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to meet the challenges posed by spatial computing, metaverse, computer aided drafting (CAD) etc.

What is Visual Asset Management System (VAMS)?

VAMS is an AWS native solution for management and distribution of visual assets. VAMS offers a simplified solution to ingest, store, and manage visual assets in the cloud. This empowers a user with a web browser to upload, visualize, transform, and retrieve visual assets. You can customize VAMS to suit your business needs by integrating it with existing workflows that use custom code, pre-built applications, and/or third-party applications.

Customer Value:

VAMS addresses challenges faced by customers embarking on Spatial Computing initiatives, such as Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). Organizations that previously had to manage these assets on local systems can now do so from a web-based application.

Leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a low-cost, high availability storage layer, VAMS provides a purpose-built API for 3D asset management. This API provides a layer of abstraction, allowing custom integrations to be built. Custom integrations allow workloads and applications to be moved to the cloud, unlocking access to the entire breadth and depth of the AWS ecosystem.

Use Cases:

Sample use cases that are leveraging VAMS today include:

  • Distribution and management of 3D Assets using highly available Amazon S3 storage
  • Modifications of 3D assets using VAMS Pipelines
  • Creating workflows for 3D asset modification using VAMS Workflows

VAMS Architecture:

VAMS Architecture

Components:

Upon successful deployment, VAMS deploys a web-based front end and exposes an API to manage your assets. You can use the  front end to view and transform the assets you have uploaded. You can also interact with VAMS programmatically by calling the API gateway endpoints in your existing application.

Features:

There are 4 distinct categories of VAMS features. These are:

  1. Databases: Databases allow you to group together multiple assets together and provides a way of categorizing your assets, pipelines and workflows based on your project needs.
  2. Assets: Assets are any individual visual artifacts that you want to store and retrieve. VAMS front end supports asset detail view that shows rendering of the asset.
    Assets in a database
    Asset Details
  3. Pipelines: Pipelines are a way to produce a new asset from existing assets. For example, when you create an Amazon SageMaker pipeline, VAMS will create a SageMaker notebook with a template that allows you to create an Amazon Elastic Container Registry repository with your pipeline code. You can modify this code to include your custom logic. Pipelines are exported as containers so they can be used in workflows.
    Pipelines View
  4. Workflows: With VAMS workflows, you can tie multiple pipelines together to produce one or more assets. Workflows execute an AWS Step Functions to invoke your pipeline containers in the backend.
    Execute Workflows
    Workflow Outputs

Workshop:

To help you get started, we have also published a self-guided workshop that walks through installation and core features of VAMS.

Conclusion:

Here at AWS, we obsess over customer needs and VAMS is a result of that. We hope that out of the box, VAMS will help you in your cloud journey. We look forward to hearing about your projects that leverage VAMS and welcome your feedback and community contributions.

Next Steps:

  1. Install the Visual Asset Management System Solution in your AWS Account.
  2. Head over to the VAMS Workshop to learn more about VAMS.