Through the Interface

A summary of news from Forge DevCon 2017

For those of you who – like me – weren’t able to travel to Las Vegas for this year’s Forge DevCon, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of the major news that I could extract over the wire. I’m sure there will be further blog posts from the Forge team summarising more of things I couldn’t see – not being there in person – but this will hopefully be of some use to people, at least. To kick things off, I suggest reading this blog post. It talks about some high-level items, such as additions to the platform,... Read more →

Picton to Christchurch

As much as I hate compressing so much into a single post, I don’t see any other option if I’m to bring you all up-to-date. So please accept my apologies for not doing justice to New Zealand’s absolutely incredible south island. In this post we’ll talk about the first part of the journey through the south island, from Picton to Christchurch. I’ll cover the journey from Christchurch to Queenstown in the next post. Here’s a quick view of our journey southwards, for context. Our adventure on the south island started the Saturday before last. We took the 2.45pm Interislander... Read more →

Autodesk is seeking a Senior Evangelist for AR/VR

There’s a very interesting job posting that I wanted to highlight for readers of this blog: Autodesk’s Immersive Experiences Group (IXG) is seeking a Senior Evangelist for Augmented and Virtual Reality. IXG is a fairly recently named group at Autodesk: I’m curious about the choice of the term Immersive, as my understanding is that the organisation’s mandate is very much also about Augmented and Mixed Reality, which for me is more contextual than immersive. But frankly that’s a minor detail: IXG does have a nice ring to it, and we do love our TLAs at Autodesk. Here’s an excerpt... Read more →

3D & Mixed Reality at Microsoft House

OK, so that was perhaps a little mad. Earlier today I spent 5 hours on the train – going from Neuchatel to Zurich and then on the new SBB service via the Gotthard Base Tunnel – to get to Milan, had a coffee with my uncle (who lives and works nearby), gave a 30-minute presentation on Forge and AR/VR at a Meetup, and then spent 4.5 hours on more trains – this time going towards Geneva on the EuroCity (formerly Cisalpino), and then changing at Brig to head via Bern – to get home. This was the main train... Read more →

Coming to Milan for a Mixed Reality Meetup

On Tuesday, I’ll be travelling to Milan and back (on the same day, by train) to present at a “3D / Mixed Reality” Meetup hosted at the beautiful new Microsoft House, headquarters of Microsoft Italia. I’ll be talking about Forge and AR/VR, and I’ll no doubt include a Dancing Robot or two, I expect. It’s pretty cool to be visiting Microsoft House: it was designed by Swiss architect Herzog & De Meuron (a good customer of Autodesk’s who I visited earlier this year in Basel) and it looks absolutely stunning. Many thanks to Giorgio Mazzucchelli for extending the invitation... Read more →

AEC Hackathon is coming to Munich (and so am I)

I’ve been interested in participating in – or at least attending – an AEC Hackathon for a couple of years now. I was first introduced to them during the VR Hackathons I attended in SF in 2014 and 2015 (Damon, Greg and Paul, who help organize the AEC Hackathons, were also organizing/involved in/attending the VR ones). There are a number of AEC Hackathons planned for Europe over the coming months, so I’m happy to say I’ll finally get my chance. I’ve been asked to present at the first – which is in Munich from March 31st – April 2nd... Read more →

Autodesk’s early role in the VR revolution

A few days ago I was reminded of a topic I’ve highlighted in a number of presentations I’ve given over the last few years, but have never actually talked about on this blog. The closest I came was probably in this post. Many people don’t realise Autodesk was an early innovator in the VR space. In the late 80s and early 90s we had a product called the Cyberspace Developer Kit – which allowed you to deliver around four frames per second of glorious, low-polygon 3D via a 386 or 486 PC – that was clearly ahead of its... Read more →

VR guinea pigs

On Friday we had our first external visitors to the VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel. Jose and Erich came across from Amstein + Walthert, an engineering firm headquartered in Zurich. Jose had reached out to me – we’ve been in contact a few times, over the years – as he’d read about the VR room on this blog and was curious to try it out. The room still isn’t 100% ready – we’re waiting for some furniture to show up – but it seemed a good opportunity to try out some of our VR demos on live volunteers. Here’s... Read more →

Merry HoloXmas!

It’s foggy and grey here in Switzerland, but thanks to the joy of mixed reality it’s always snowing when you want it to be. If only it worked on the slopes! All the very best to this blog’s readers for the festive season. Have a wonderful, relaxing break – those of you who are taking time off – and I’ll see you back here in 2017! Read more →

HoloLens and Forge at the Munich Accelerator

It’s been a challenging few days of “acceleration” in Munich. We’ve had a large, highly motivated crowd, which has definitely been a highlight. On the lowlight side, during the last 24 hours we’ve had our first major outage of the Forge platform. A core service, ACM – our Access Control Manager – went down early yesterday morning (for us here in Europe). This impacted both the Data Management and Model Derivative APIs, without which you can’t really use the Forge viewer, for example, as well as various other cloud-connected products such as Fusion 360 and Collaboration for Revit. Thankfully... Read more →

The European DevDay in Munich

On Sunday I flew out to Munich for our annual European DevDay. For the first time I chose to fly from Bern’s airport in Belp, which is a short 45-minute drive from my home. It’s a small airport, so I could park right next to the terminal and walk a short distance to the check-in. Here’s the plane I took – an Embraer turbo-prop. Checking into the Ramada Hotel in Munich, I realised I’d stayed here before for one of the Autodesk Soccer tournaments. I’d forgotten how long the corridors were, and I was unfortunately assigned a room right... Read more →

Speak at the Autodesk Forge DevCon 2017: call for papers now open

The “call for papers” is now open for the next edition of the Forge DevCon being held at Fort Mason in San Francisco on June 27-28, 2017. Here’s a quick reminder of how the first DevCon went down, to whet your appetite. You can already pre-register your interest in attending, but I’m currently more focused on getting potential speakers to sign up to talk. I’ll once again be running the AR/VR track (as well as the associated exhibition area) for the event, so if you feel you have something to share in this space, please go ahead and submit... Read more →

VR/AR, Generative Design and Robots at AU2016

As usual, this year’s Autodesk University was a crazy tech-fest. Here’s a lightning round-up of some of the cool stuff I saw, through the lens of my personal interests and the small amount of spare time I managed to spend exploring. Firstly, AR and VR were everywhere. The Future of Making Things Pavilion had 11 different VR booths, some of which were connected for collaborative experiences. I didn’t get to try any (argh!) but I’m told I’ll be getting access to the experiences for our VR installation in Neuchatel, in due course. One of my favourite projects in recent... Read more →

Autodesk University 2016: keynotes and classes

Tuesday was my big day at AU2016: my colleagues, Alex Tessier, and I delivered a short segment during the Construction Launchpad session attended by roughly 1,000 people. This shot gives some idea of the size of the audience. I think it’s probably the first time I’ve delivered a session with a camera showing me in close-up on the big screen. Here are a few tweets from the audience, showing what it probably looked like. Collaborative design review - Autodesk research using Microsoft Halolens. @keanw #au2016 pic.twitter.com/WoAdpa7otE— Clay Helm (@HelmClay) November 15, 2016 Visualising data using @Autodesk Dasher 360 as... Read more →

Dancing Robot takes the stage at the Las Vegas DevDay

Yesterday Autodesk held its first Developer Day of the 2016 season with a pre-conference event ahead of Autodesk University 2016 in Las Vegas. My old pals at the Developer Network team had asked me to participate, so I came along and presented a session on Virtual and Augmented Reality at Autodesk. The main event was primarily about Forge, natureally enough. It’s great to see how the platform’s evolving, over time. During the VR/AR session we spent time looking at various VR-related technologies available from Autodesk, and then demoed a couple of AR prototypes Cyrille Fauvel and I had created.... Read more →

My plans for Autodesk University 2016

On Saturday I’ll be flying out to Las Vegas for the latest Autodesk University. I thought I was going to have a relatively lightweight AU, this year – I have just one class to deliver – but that’s not how it turned out, in the end. My first big engagement is at the ADN pre-conference, where Cyrille Fauvel and I will be talking about VR and AR at Autodesk. It’s going to be a fun session – typically we get around 500 attendees at the DevDay, so it’s a big crowd. While it’s hard to demo these technologies to... Read more →

AR and VR in Zurich

I had a really excellent day, yesterday. I’d flown in from Munich, the night before, and stayed at the charming Zum Guten Glück restaurant/hostel in Zurich. After collecting my key I met Rob Morgan – who was also due to speak at the next day’s Expanding Immersive Design conference – and we headed out for the pre-arranged dinner together. After a slight Uber-snafu (there are two restaurants named Markthalle in Zurich – who knew?) we found the right place and had a very nice meal, enjoying highly engaging discussions with our fellow speakers. Yesterday morning – rather than heading... Read more →

Yesterday’s AR Meetup in Lausanne

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Cyrille and I were heading across to Lausanne to host an AR Meetup. It’s our third Meetup for this particular group: the first was in the Autodesk office in Neuchatel, while the second and third have been held at the excellent Studio Banana. This one was really fun: between Cyrille and I we had three HoloLens devices for people to try, which made for a really interesting event. Cyrille kicked off proceedings with a discussion of AR and VR in general, and where things stand right now. Key Kawamura – from Studio Banana... Read more →

AR, MoCap and Drones

I’ve had the pleasure of having Cyrille Fauvel from the Forge team with me in Neuchatel, this week. I’ve worked with Cyrille for many years, and we continue to be interested in very similar technology areas (particularly AR/VR, IoT and robotics/UAVs). So we inevitably have lots to talk about. :-) So it’s been a fun-packed few days: on Wednesday we spent the afternoon at Microcity at the Innovation World Cup Conference which was focused primarily on wearable computing and IoT. There were a number of presentations both from established platform providers such as STMicroelectronics and BSH (Bosch) and from... Read more →

SINDEX 16: Cuddly robots are the future

After the fun of participating in last week’s Hackathon, I headed across to Bern for SINDEX 2016. SINDEX is a biannual exhibition focused on industrial automation. I went to the last one and found it really interesting – well worth going back to, especially given my involvement in IoT and my interest in robotics. The event is probably a smaller, Swiss version of the Hannover Messe, although I’m only really guessing as I’ve never been there. It was also a good chance to meet with a few companies who will be exhibiting their products at the upcoming Design Night... Read more →