The Interface

Overview

The screen is built so the 3D model keeps the room and everything else stays at the edges. Panels open over the left side, tools sit in a narrow strip next to them, machine messages arrive on the right, and the view controls stay in the bottom corner.

Which elements you see depends on the delivery. A twin handed to an operator can be reduced to the 3D view and its messages; an engineering setup shows everything on this page. Nothing here is required for a twin to work — it is what is available.

The left bar

The vertical bar on the far left opens the docked panels. One panel per side is open at a time; opening another replaces it.

Button	What it opens
Projects	The documents you can open — the ones you saved yourself and the built-in examples — plus any attached libraries
Hierarchy	The structure of the twin as a tree
Annotations	Notes pinned to positions in the model
CONNECT	The gateway connection: interfaces, live signals, bridges
Multiuser	Shared sessions, when the delivery has them
Settings	Everything under Settings below
About	Version, build and licence of this viewer
Help	This documentation, opened in a new tab at the page that matches what you are doing — the window you have open, otherwise the workspace you are in

The help button sits at the bottom of the bar, and F1 does the same thing. F1 keeps working where the bar is hidden, for example in first-person view; it stays silent while you are typing in a field, and in a kiosk delivery where help is switched off.

Hierarchy

The hierarchy is the reliable way to reach a part that is hard to hit in 3D — inside a housing, behind a fence, or too small to click. Selecting a node selects the geometry, and selecting geometry highlights the node, so the tree and the model always agree.

Moving through the tree

• Expand and collapse with the arrow in front of a node. A node without an arrow is a leaf: geometry with nothing below it.
• Click a node to select it. The geometry highlights in the 3D view, and the component information opens for it.
• Click a part in the 3D view and the tree scrolls to it and expands whatever was collapsed on the way. This is the direction people forget: you do not have to find things in the tree — you can find them in the model and let the tree follow.
• The name is what the model brought with it. A well-prepared twin has speaking names; a raw CAD import has whatever the CAD system called the parts, which is exactly what the Editor is for.
• The top row is the file itself. The first row of the tree is the model’s own root. You can select it and read its components and metadata like any other node, but it carries no eye toggle and no drag handle: its name is the first segment of every path below it, and its position is the origin the whole file is measured against. The lock shows up as fewer controls on that row, not as an extra badge to learn. In the Editor the root’s transform is displayed but permanently read-only, while everything below it stays editable.

Nodes in italics are groups rather than geometry — the structure the model was built with. The counter at the bottom of the panel gives the total node count, which is the fastest sanity check after an import: 79 nodes for a station, 126 for a cell, and a number in the thousands means the model was exported without any grouping.

Signals in the tree

Each component shows its signals next to it with direction and current value, which makes the tree the fastest place to see what a component is actually doing. A red chip is an input written by the twin, a green one an output written by the controller — the same colours as everywhere else in the viewer. Signals connected to the gateway are marked as connected, so an unbound name stands out instead of quietly doing nothing.

Components that can record and replay their motion carry Rec and Replay next to the name.

Notes on a node

A node can carry a note — a piece of written knowledge that travels inside the document: what this assembly is for, how it is commissioned, which torque a bolt takes. Where a note exists, the component information shows it as formatted text rather than as a raw field, with a short header giving when it was written, by whom, and how confident its author was. Long notes get their own scrolling box that grows with the window instead of stretching the panel.

Notes are shown read-only here. They are written where the document is authored, not while you are inspecting it.

Filtering

The filter in the panel header narrows a long tree to one family — drives, sensors, signals or logic — which turns “find the drive that moves this axis” from scrolling into one click. The filter stays active until you reset it, and the header shows that it is on.

The tool strip

The narrow strip beside the panels holds the tools of the active workspace. In an HMI delivery that is typically:

Tool	What it does
Machine, Drives, Sensors	Filtered views of what the machine contains
Alarms	Current faults, with a badge counting them
Maintenance	Due and overdue maintenance
AAS Components	Parts that carry Asset Administration Shell data
Order Cart	Spare parts collected for an order
Measure distance	Distance between two points in the model
Historian	Recorded signals as curves over time — see data recording
Section / Clip	A cut plane through the model to look inside

View controls

The bottom right corner controls what you see, without changing the model:

• Camera presets 1, 2, 3 — stored viewpoints for a repeatable inspection position. A short click jumps there, holding the button saves the current view onto it.
• Visibility and layer switches — hide groups of geometry, for example a fence or a housing.
• VR and first-person — enter the scene with a headset or walk through it, where the delivery supports it.

The cube in the top right corner shows the current orientation; clicking one of its faces snaps the camera to that axis. Below it, the projection switches between perspective and orthographic.

Along the top edge sit the workspace mode selector and, in an HMI delivery, the key figures. The H key hides the whole overlay and leaves only the 3D model — useful for a screenshot or a wall display.

Settings

Settings are stored in the browser, not in the model. They follow the person at the machine, not the twin, and a delivery can lock individual tabs so an operator cannot change them.

Tab	What it holds
Visual	Render mode, environment, lighting, shadows, post-processing, UI zoom — the levers for a weaker or stronger machine
Mouse & Touch	Rotate, pan and zoom speed, inertia, adaptive navigation
Start View	The camera position this model opens with
Simulation	Physics behaviour of the local simulation
Groups	Which visibility groups are hidden at load
Interfaces	Protocol selection and how signal chips are rendered
Multiuser	Shared sessions
AI	The AI bridge and its documentation index
Dev Tools, Tests	Diagnostics, scene statistics and the performance budget
Backup	Export and import all settings, or reset them

Not every tab is present in every delivery. Multiuser and AI appear only where the delivery includes them, Dev Tools and Tests are hidden on a phone or tablet, and a delivery can lock individual tabs so an operator cannot change them. A commercial delivery adds a Features tab in the authoring workspaces — Editor, Planner and DES — which lists the runtime plugins behind the delivery with a switch each; it is deliberately not offered here in the viewer.

Three of those switches are worth knowing because they change what you see in 3D rather than what the viewer can do:

Switch	What it draws
Drive axis gizmo	The axis, travel limits and current position of a selected drive, drawn into the model
Connection gizmo	The cables and links between connected components
IK path visualizer	The programmed path of a robot, with its targets

Switching one off releases what it was drawing rather than just hiding it, so turning off a layer you are not looking at is a legitimate way to buy performance on a weak machine. The choice is remembered per project, so a diagnosis you set up on one project does not follow you into the next. Plugins the viewer needs to stay usable cannot be switched off at all; if a stored choice ever leaves the viewer in a bad state, add ?resetPlugins=1 to the URL once to clear it.

Each tab is described in detail under Settings. The viewer version and build number are at the bottom of the panel — the first thing to quote in a support question.

Quick Start

1. Open Hierarchy and expand the twin until you find a component.
2. Select it and confirm the geometry highlights in the 3D view.
3. Read its signals beside the tree entry.
4. Open Settings ▸ Visual and lower the quality if the model runs sluggishly.
5. Press H to hide the overlay, and again to bring it back.

See also

• Navigation and controls — mouse, touch and keyboard
• Documents — what a document brings with it
• Machine information system — what a selected part can tell you
• Signals and alarms — the live values behind the tree