Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #40

As we’re in the middle of the 2021 Olympics – well, more honestly because I happened to stumble across the floppy it was on – this week’s episode is all about the sports-related games contained in The Ball Games Pack for the Commodore 64. This compilation contains four games, one of which we played in Floppy Friday #36 (the classic Football Manager), so this week we just played the other three: Kick Off – a very decent yet fairly tricky soccer (yes, football) game – followed by Head Coach – a Football Manager-like game for American Football fans –... Read more →

Come and work for Autodesk Research in Pier 9!

San Francisco’s Pier 9 has got to one of the coolest Autodesk office locations to work from. You have access to all kind of cool technology, and it’s also full of pretty cool people, too. As a reminder, here’s an old post that shows the office, and here’s another that introduces the work we did there to prototype technology for the MX3D bridge. If this is the kind of work environment that gets you excited, then you may be even more excited to hear that our team is hiring for Senior Web Developer (someone with full stack development skills).... Read more →

Registration is now open for Autodesk University 2021

I’m a little late to the announcement party on this one – as I was busy gushing about the MX3D bridge, last week – but it does still feel like it’s worth posting a reminder to people. While it may seem like a long way away – as the event itself is in early October – it certainly doesn’t hurt to register early for AU, even when it’s free, virtual and with no restrictions on the number of participants (at least none that I’m aware of). The Forge team, for instance, has a number of plans to engage with... Read more →

Floppy Friday #39

I’m up in the mountains, this week, but managed to record an episode of Floppy Friday over the weekend, so we don’t skip a week. At least not this week. :-) This week’s episode takes a look at four Commodore 64 games, three of which worked fine. We start with Rambo – First Blood Part II – a game I’d been looking for for some time – then play Sword of Honour, a classic fighting game. We then try to play Superstar Ice Hockey, and while it seemed to load fine, I couldn’t find a way to play it.... Read more →

The MX3D bridge and its colours

After having talked about its opening, and its data, it’s time to wrap up this week’s triptych of posts about the MX3D bridge by taking a moment to appreciate its beauty. The bridge has been printed from stainless steel and has not received any surface treatment – other than sandblasting and the manual removal of any jaggedness that might cause injury… the point is that there isn’t a layer of paint or lacquer covering it. It’s amazing to me (again, a software guy, so take this with a pinch of salt) that the bridge has this golden sheen. The... Read more →

Data from the MX3D smart bridge

The MX3D team first showed the smart bridge to the public back in October 2018 at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. I was there with the team to finish and test features such as realtime display of skeletons detected using computer vision. Here’s a reminder of how that went: An interesting aspect of the public’s response to the bridge at DDW2018 was that it had broad appeal to people but that people appreciated different aspects of the project: The majority view: “wow, what a cool-looking bridge!” Those who dug a little deeper: “it was 3D-printed by robots? Interesting –... Read more →

The MX3D bridge opens to the public

On Wednesday afternoon I headed back across to Zurich airport for my second trip to Amsterdam in as many weeks. This time I was flying with Swiss rather than KLM, and ended up checking in and boarding through an area of the airport I didn’t recognise at all. Whether this was because it had been so long since I’d been there or due to some deep refurbishment being completed during the pandemic remains to be seen. By the time I arrived in Amsterdam, things had progressed significantly with the MX3D bridge. Here’s a fun staged photo by Thijs Wolzak... Read more →

Floppy Friday #38

In this week’s episode we take a look at four more games loaded from floppy onto a Commodore 64. This week’s selection ended up being quite interesting, in my perhaps not so humble opinion. We started with Platoon, then Spy vs. Spy, A View to a Kill (which unfortunately I didn’t end up being able to play, despite three attempts at loading it), and then wrapping up with Theatre Europe. Hopefully these will bring back good memories for at least a few people. Theatre Europe in particular received a stunning review from Zzap!64 magazine: It’s probably impossible for anyone... Read more →

Autodesk Tandem is now officially available

These are busy times in the world of digital twins at Autodesk! I'm thrilled to see the news that Autodesk Tandem has now officially launched. Head on over to the new landing page, intandem.autodesk.com, to find out more, or check out Bob Bray’s recent article. A few people have either been congratulating me or asking how this relates to Project Dasher, so I think it's worth clarifying the situation. Tandem is not Dasher, although I'd love to think that the Dasher story at least in some way influenced or inspired Tandem's trajectory. Tandem solves a fundamental industry problem that... Read more →

Lowering the MX3D bridge

Now that the weekend has passed and the football is over for another year or so (for me, anyway, as I only pay attention to major tournaments), I thought I’d share some of the work that was done last week on the MX3D bridge, and what’s planned for this coming week. The major work done on Friday was to raise the bridge (allowing access to the current foundations) and to start the job of lowering it. Sometimes you have to go up to go down. I was impressed by the fact the bridge could be raised – one end... Read more →

Floppy Friday #37

In this week’s episode we play four classic Commodore 64 games. Tetris needs no introduction, of course, while we then went on to play a horizontal shooter called Delta followed by what may have been the “goriest game of the 80s”: Deathwish III. We wrapped up with a quick play of a racing game called Buggy Boy. All in all it was a fun episode, once again. That said, I was really a bit shocked at the amount of blood shown in Deathwish III. Here’s its Zzap!64 review from September 1987: Today is my last day in Amsterdam –... Read more →

An update from Amsterdam

It’s now Thursday night, and tomorrow morning we’ll be heading home from Amsterdam. As with any project, some things haven’t gone quite as smoothly as they might, but more on that in a bit. My son and I proudly donned our MX3D T-shirts for this morning’s pic: Here’s another shot from the bridge itself, looking down the canal. Now for some information about the main issue currently impacting the project. Here’s a video I took while on the bridge, that shows a quick walkover and the canal views. As you can see, there’s an issue with the clearance between... Read more →

First glimpse of the MX3D bridge installed

This morning I headed with our eldest son (he’ll be 17 in just over a week – how did that happen?) to Zurich airport to catch our first flight in what seems like forever to travel to Amsterdam to see the MX3D bridge being installed. Even catching the train was surreal: I’ve certainly done so, during the pandemic, but only for personal trips. My usual habit of grabbing breakfast in the dining car didn’t go so smoothly when I realised I could no longer remember the PIN for my corporate card. Luckily I could go contactless – SBB breakfasts... Read more →

Floppy Friday #36

In this week’s episode we take a look at three more Commodore 64 games loaded from a random floppy disk I found amongst the collection. The first, Football Manager, is a stone-cold classic. Not the most visually interesting of games, but one that enthralled a generation. The next two are on the stranger side. There’s Hunchback at the Olympics – which is a very, very quirky sequel in the Hunchback series – and then there’s Rocketball, which I’ve now found out was based on the movie Rollerball. It was set in 2010, so it’s another of those “where’s my... Read more →

15 years of this blog

If you’re going to forget an anniversary, let it be the one for your first engagement with social media. The very definition of a victimless crime. I just remembered that it was back in June 2006 when I started this blog (the welcome post was on June 19th, 2006, so I didn’t miss it by much). It’s been quite the ride… 2021 posts over 15 years, at an average of about 2.6 posts per week, rain or shine. I always set myself the goal of 3 posts per week, but in recent years that’s dropped back to 2 or... Read more →

The light at the end of the… smart bridge

This weekend I had a very strange task to perform: I had to book travel for work. Remembering how our corporate travel system worked was just one hurdle to cross – beyond that I had to deal with getting the appropriate management and travel department approvals, along with the fact I’ve booked a separate ticket for my 16-year old son to come along, and wanted to be 100% sure that we’re on the same flight. Was life really this complicated pre-pandemic? I’m sure I’ll get used to it all again, before long. The reason I’m travelling is pretty exciting,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #35

In this week’s episode we play YALNG (Yet Another Last Ninja Game), The Last Ninja 3, followed by Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior and Shanghai (a version of mahjong). Many thanks to Martin Griffin for the inspiration to dig up TLN3. As usual I did what I could to play these games without any advance preparation, so the mileage definitely varied. Here’s the cover art for this week’s games: See you next week! Read more →

Applying heatmap power to single-sensor volumes

I’ve been heads-down on a side project to integrate a C++ library into Forge using Web Assembly (hopefully I’ll share more on this sometime soon). Thankfully while I’ve been busy on that, the Hyperion team has been beavering away on some changes to their core shader. Last week I realised – now that we have controls to adjust the confidence and power settings in the shader – that rooms with just one sensor have a uniform shading style. This was a deliberate choice we made, back when we initially implemented the shader, as we felt it would help highlight... Read more →

Floppy Friday #34

In this week’s episode we take a look at three classic Commodore 64 games. The first game, The Last Ninja 2, is a sequel to a game we played last week, of course. The second game, Ghostbusters, is one I used to play on my ZX Spectrum as a child, although the C64 version looks quite different. The last game, Fighter Pilot, was basically incomprehensible, but there you go. Here’s the cover art for these three games (although I’m not completely sure about the last one). One of these days I’m going to have a “ZX Spectrum classics” episode,... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 2

In the first post in this series we looked at how a heatmap can be used to shade an object using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension – or Project Hyperion. In our case we shaded the surface of the MX3D bridge. In this post we look at a slightly different use-case for this mechanism, where we want to shade a piece of geometry inside the model based on the value of a particular sensor. To be clear: this is about shading the entire object a uniform colour that varies based on the value of the sensor that’s providing... Read more →