Through the Interface

TEDxCERN videos are now online

The videos from the TEDxCERN event I attended in late September are now online. As I’m busy working on my AU 2014 presentations, here’s a selection of the ones I think will be of most interest to this audience. You can always go through the full playlist on YouTube, of course: they are all worth watching. The surprising strengths of materials in the nanoworld | Julia Greer Is a vaccine for cancer possible? | Sonia Trigueros The weirdness of water could be the answer | Marcia Barbosa When a tree calls for help | Topher White Remote heart diagnosis... Read more →

And the winner is…

Thanks to all of you who contributed responses to last week’s “guess the dashboard” competition. I had a lot of fun seeing the responses roll in! I didn’t actually expect anyone to get the “right” answer – as the service the dashboard is monitoring hadn’t been announced publicly, at the time – but I was impressed by the Autodesk employees who used their knowledge to try and get a free t-shirt – that’s the kind of initiative that helped build this company into what it is today ;-). With 20-20 hindsight I probably should have specifically excluded Autodeskers from... Read more →

Adding speech recognition to our stereoscopic Google Cardboard viewer

I nearly named this post “Creating a stereoscopic viewer for Google Cardboard using the Autodesk 360 viewer – Part 4”, leading on from the series introduction and then parts 1, 2 & 3. But then I decided this topic deserved it’s very own title. :-) The seed for this post was sown during the VR Hackathon, at the beginning of which I had an inspiring chat with Theo Armour. Not only does Theo have a name worthy of a gladiator – and it turns out there is a list of gladiator names on the Internet, just one more reason... Read more →

AutoCAD I/O API: a new batch processing web-service

This is really interesting news I’ve been waiting to share for a while, now. And of course it’s the answer to the question I posed in my last post (this is the service the dashboard has been monitoring). Once I get back home to Switzerland I’ll go through the various comments on the post and LinkedIn, to see who wins the prize. :-) The AutoCAD team has been working hard on a cloud-based batch-processing framework that works with AutoCAD data. The current name for the service is the AutoCAD I/O API – Beta. The service is powered by AcCore,... Read more →

A dashboard... but what for?

Here’s a little bit of fun. There’s a new dashboard in the San Rafael office, but what does it show? Post your guess as a comment: the closest – or most humorous, depending on my mood – will win a free “I♥3D” Autodesk T-shirt (I’ll contact the winner to get their size). And when I say humorous that doesn’t mean rude or insulting. Please keep it clean & polite, people. :-) Read more →

VR Hackathon 2014 in SF

It’s been a busy few days. After being in full-day meetings on Thursday and Friday, I headed down with Jim Quanci to the VR Hackathon’s kick-off event on Friday night. It was held at the newly refurbished Gray Area Theater in San Francisco’s Mission district. The Friday night “mega meetup” was a great way to kick the event off, with presentations from NASA’s JPL on how they teamed up with Sony to develop a prototype VR system to control robots for asteroid mining. There was also an interesting presentation on the evolution of VR tech from Leap Motion’s founder... Read more →

Creating a stereoscopic viewer for Google Cardboard using the Autodesk 360 viewer – Part 3

After introducing the topic, showing a basic stereoscopic viewer using the Autodesk 360 viewer and then adding full-screen and device-tilt navigation, today we’re going to extend our UI to allow viewing of multiple models. Firstly it’s worth pointing out that for models to be accessible by the viewer that makes use of my client credentials, I also need to upload that content with the same credentials. You can follow the procedure in this previous post to see how you do that, although I believe the ADN team has created some samples that help simplify the process, too. Once you... Read more →

Creating a stereoscopic viewer for Google Cardboard using the Autodesk 360 viewer – Part 2

I’m heading out the door in a few minutes to take the train to Zurich and a (thankfully direct) flight from there to San Francisco. I’ll have time on the flight to write up the next part in the series, so all will be in place for this weekend’s VR Hackathon. In today’s post we’re going to extend the implementation we saw yesterday (and introduced on Monday) by adding full-screen viewing and device-tilt navigation. Full-screen mode is easy: I borrowed some code from here that works well, the only thing to keep in mind is that the API can... Read more →

Creating a stereoscopic viewer for Google Cardboard using the Autodesk 360 viewer – Part 1

After yesterday’s introduction to this series of posts, today we’re going to dive into some specifics, implementing a basic, web-based, stereoscopic viewer. While this series of posts is really about using Google Cardboard to view Autodesk 360 models in 3D (an interesting topic, I hope you’ll agree ;-), it’s also about how easily you can use the Autodesk 360 viewer to power Google Cardboard: we’ll see it’s a straightforward way to get 3D content into a visualization system that’s really all about 3D. Let’s start with some basics. We clearly need two views in our web-page, one for each... Read more →

Gearing up for the VR Hackathon

I’m heading back across to the Bay Area on Wednesday for 10 days. There seems to be a pattern forming to my trips across: I’ll spend the first few days in San Francisco – in this case attending internal strategy meetings in our 1 Market office – and then head up after the weekend to San Rafael to work with the members of the AutoCAD engineering team based up there. I’ll still probably head back into SF for the odd day, the following week, but that’s fine: I really like commuting by ferry from Larkspur to the Embarcadero. The... Read more →

New Memento build and webinar

As reported over on Scott’s blog, Project Memento v1.0.10.5 is now available on Autodesk Labs. I won’t repeat the specific new features in this release – Scott covers those thoroughly – but I will say that I’m personally most excited about trying the improved .OBJ and .FBX export and the workflows that they enable. To find out more about Memento, there’s a webinar on Wednesday October 15 at 9am Pacific talking about the tool. During the webinar, Tatjana Dzambazova – whom you may have seen in her excellent TEDx session – will cover topics such from uploading photos, working... Read more →

Autodesk software is free for students, teachers and schools (yes, really)

I mentioned this initiative a few months ago, but it turns it hadn’t been rolled out everywhere: there were regional exceptions meaning that students in certain countries weren’t eligible for the program at that point. So my apologies if it sounds like I’m repeating myself, but at least it’s good news that I’m announcing twice. :-) The last kinks have been ironed out of the program, so now students, teachers and schools anywhere in the world can now download and use the following Autodesk software for free… So if you’re a student who was expecting to be able to... Read more →

Update on Spark, Autodesk’s 3D printing platform

There’s been a lot in the news about Spark – Autodesk’s entry into the 3D printing market – of late. Earlier in the year we announced this open platform and a reference design for it, but in the last few weeks things have become even more interesting: specific examples of partnerships with companies who are building their own printers based on Spark have started to emerge. I thought it worth aggregating a few of the more interesting articles for those who might have missed them. I’m personally really interested in the approach Autodesk is taking here. It seems to... Read more →

Connecting Three.js to an AutoCAD model – Part 2

To follow on from yesterday’s post, today we’re going to look at two C# source files that work with the HTML page – and referenced JavaScript files – which I will leave online rather than reproducing here. As a brief reminder of the functionality – if you haven’t yet watched the screencast shown last time – this version of the app shows an embedded 3D view that reacts to the creation – and deletion – of geometry from the associated AutoCAD model. You will see the bounding boxes for geometry appear in the WebGL view (powered by Three.js) as... Read more →

Connecting Three.js to an AutoCAD model – Part 1

As part of my preparations for AU, I’ve been extending this Three.js integration sample to make it more responsive to model changes: I went ahead and implemented event handlers in .NET – much as we saw in the last post – to send interaction information through to JavaScript so that it can update the HTML palette view. The code is in pretty good shape, but I still need to decide whether to post it separately or with the other JavaScript samples I’m working on (I’ll also be showing Paper.js and Isomer integrations during my AU talk, as well as... Read more →