Through the Interface

First impressions of Kinect for Windows 2.0 pre-release

I was hoping to get the Kinect for Windows 2.0 pre-release developer kit in time for AU – so I can talk about it intelligently, even if I don’t end up demoing it – so when the UPS delivery man showed up, yesterday, I was very happy. As always, it started with a simple box: Which, once opened, revealed some nice monochrome graphics: And the device itself, of course (tripod is model’s own ;-). The addition of the tripod screw-hole on the bottom is very welcome: I ended up buying a somewhat flimsy and unstable 3rd party tripod for... Read more →

Debugging AutoCAD using Visual Studio 2013

There are lots of reasons to want to use the newly-released Visual Studio 2013 to develop and debug .NET modules for AutoCAD. One of the main ones is the long-awaited addition of Edit & Continue support for 64-bit applications. Unfortunately in this post we’ll see why, despite the wait, E&C isn’t going to work when debugging 64-bit .NET modules inside AutoCAD. The primary issue when running AutoCAD from the VS2013 debugger manifests itself in issues with font loading. If you launch AutoCAD from VS2013 to debug a 64-bit class library – even without actually loading the module – then... Read more →

Driving AutoCAD using a SensorTag’s accelerometer

Over the last few days, I’ve been playing around with Texas Instruments’ SensorTag device, working out how to connect it to AutoCAD and make use of the data coming in from it to manipulate the current view. As mentioned in this previous post, the SensorTag is a $25 device containing a number of sensors – an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, a thermometer, a hygrometer and a barometer – that communicates to a monitoring system (whether an iOS or Android mobile device or a Windows or Linux PC) via Bluetooth 4.0. So what is it I expected to do... Read more →

The Autodesk Community gets a facelift

It seems there’s more and more support traffic from developers going through the Autodesk Community, these days – I know the ADN team has been encouraging use of the developer-centric forums, which appears to be having some effect – and the site itself has just been on the receiving end of a much-welcomed redesign. The redesign is intended to improve the “findability” of community content as well as providing a more personalised experience for users. Here’s a screenshot of my own welcome page on the Autodesk Community, for instance: Yes, it’s been a while since my last forum post.... Read more →

Scanning the Fountain of Justice using Kinect Fusion and AutoCAD

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, on Monday I spent a few hours in the early morning at the local archeological museum, the Laténium. While this is nowhere near the scale of the Smithsonian, it is the largest archeological museum in Switzerland and is well known by people in the field, especially those interested in La Tène culture. I love the Laténium – our kids often seem to go there for birthday parties, which certainly beat the ones held at the local McDonalds – and so I was delighted to get to go “behind closed doors” (the museum is closed... Read more →

Browsing parts of the Smithsonian catalog online in 3D

Last week was an exciting one for the organisation at Autodesk that works on “Reality Computing” (a broader term I’ve seen recently that includes “Reality Capture” at the beginning, followed by “Reality Modeling and Analysis” and then “Reality Delivery”). Their big announcement was a partnership with the Smithsonian – the venerable Washington DC-based institution that is the world’s largest museum and research complex – to bring digital scans of many important exhibits online and accessible to all via the Smithsonian x3D Explorer. Shaan talks about the announcement in depth on his blog. I won’t repeat what he’s said over... Read more →

Generating larger preview images for all blocks in an AutoCAD drawing using .NET

There was an interesting coincidence, earlier in the week. A blog comment came in on an old post on the exact day there was an internal email discussion on the same topic. The post was about using the BLOCKICON command on a document that gets loaded into the editor just for that purpose, generating a thumbnail image on disk for each of the contained block definitions. The problem with this approach – as was suggested by a couple of people in blog comments – is that the generated thumbnail is really small at just 32 x 32 pixels. The... Read more →

AU Online LIVE: session on Kinect Fusion and AutoCAD

For those of you unable to attend AU 2013 in person, the keynote sessions and a small number of this year’s classes will be streamed live. And they’re free to attend: you just need to be registered with AU Online. I’m lucky to be presenting one of only 11 classes that are scheduled to be broadcast over the web as well as having a live audience: it seems my Kinect Fusion session is the only developer-centric class that’s been selected for this year’s AU Online, which is quite the honour. Hopefully I’ll do it justice! A good piece of... Read more →

Ray-tracing Apollonian packings

Over the weekend I managed to complete the BerkeleyX Foundations of Computer Graphics class. This was really an excellent class, both in terms of the structure of the lectures and the homework assignments, which actually scaled in a non-linear way (the last assignment took as much time to complete as the previous three combined). But you were eased into it and didn’t strictly need to do the last piece of homework (which was to write a ray-tracer from scratch) to get a “pass” on the course. What’s nice about these MOOCs is that – in order to scale, putting... Read more →

Leap Motion, Kinect Fusion, SensorTag

Yesterday I presented a condensed sneak peek of my upcoming AU sessions on Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion to colleagues in the Neuchâtel office (I’ll do the same at our office in Gümligen next week). It was good to make sure my various demos are working well in time for AU, as well as creating some awareness around the possibilities presented by these two technologies. We attempted a live capture of a chair using Kinect Fusion, which actually came out surprisingly well (the Kinect’s USB cable popped out as I was trying to scan the chair’s back, but the... Read more →

3D printing tech previews on Autodesk Labs: Projects Miller and Shapeshifter

I was chatting with a colleague in Tel Aviv, yesterday, and he gave me the heads-up on a project that was about to be launched on Autodesk Labs, developed by the Autodesk Research team based in his office (thanks, Benny! :-). I checked this morning and there it was… The project is called Project Shapeshifter – accessible via shapeshifter.io – and here’s what it says in its About box: Project Shapeshifter is a free technology preview by Autodesk. It provides an easy way to create complex 3D Printable models in your web browser. With a simple tweak of sliders,... Read more →

Using AutoCAD to debug external ray-tracing routines

Over the weekend I had some more fun with the ray-tracing application I’m writing for my BerkeleyX homework. This time, though, I ended up using AutoCAD to do some debugging (which was an interesting twist). The big problem with debugging an app such as a ray-tracer is that it’s hard to picture a complex 3D scene in your mind – especially when there are lots of transformations being applied to the various objects in the model. At least it’s not something my mind is at all good at. AutoCAD, on the other hand, is very good at helping you... Read more →

Writing a ray-tracer

As mentioned in this previous post – in-between bouts of preparation for AU2013 and my other work responsibilities – I’ve been spending time following an edX class on computer graphics. It’s been really beneficial: I’ve shored up some of the basics I’d missed out on studying formally at university and it was a great continuation of many of the concepts gleaned from the linear algebra class on Coursera. The final assignment in the class has been a challenge: I’ve had to write a ray-racer from the ground up. It’s been really interesting, though: there are various steps to go... Read more →