Through the Interface

Happy Halloween!

As is typical, for this time of year, there were some strange sightings at Autodesk Neuchâtel, today. Here I am dressed as Jabba the Hutt, getting a latte in our new coffee area. The costume’s a lot of fun, if a little hot. It has an integrated fan, powered by 4 AA batteries, so at least there’s some air circulating. It’s a little tricky to walk in (especially when going through doors – I’ve learned to do a little spin to make sure the tail doesn’t get caught and I end up falling on my nose), but at least... Read more →

Mapping Zork inside AutoCAD – Part 2

In the last post we saw how we could integrate an HTML and JavaScript palette hosting Cytoscape.js into AutoCAD to map progress made in a text adventure. In today’s post we take the additional step of converting the graph data into AutoCAD geometry. To be clear, there’s a bit more to this post than having fun mapping old-school interactive fiction inside AutoCAD: I can think of lots of scenarios where you might want to use a comparable tool to build a graph of data and lay it out manually before bringing the graph into AutoCAD as native geometry. But... Read more →

Mapping Zork inside AutoCAD – Part 1

I mostly despise jetlag but once in a while manage to harness it for something positive. I remember some great trips to Asia, waking up at strange times to experience the dawn, walking the streets and seeing everyday life starting up around me. These days I typically find jetlag to be a bit of a curse, but this weekend I ended up using it to tackle a fun challenge: generating maps for Z-machine games such as Zork inside AutoCAD. Something I mentioned in a recent blog post but was reminded of last Thursday while catching up with Christer Janson... Read more →

A quick trip to the OCTO robotics lab on Pier 9

Just to put the cherry on the cake that was my week in San Francisco, I went across to Pier 9, this afternoon, to catch up with David Thomasson and visit the robotics laboratory belonging to Autodesk’s Office of the CTO. David and team are working on some really interesting projects. The first will be unveiled at AU 2015 and investigates the potential for humans and robots to build things together that neither group could on their own. Visitors to the exhibit at AU will have tasks to perform in conjunction with robots – with these tasks being coordinated... Read more →

The future of VR is web and mobile

Last night, I left the (very fun) party at the X Summit a little early: partly because I knew I was presenting this morning and needed a clear head, but mainly to attend a WebVR meet-up being held at Mozilla. I’m rarely in the Bay Area and it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity to attend the event, especially as it was a chance to hang out with Jim Quanci and Goran Borjesson, a colleague visiting from Gothenberg. I’ll describe my experiences of the evening’s proceedings, but you can also watch the online recording. It was really an... Read more →

At the Autodesk X Summit in San Francisco

I’m in San Francisco again for the Autodesk X Summit 2015. The event is targeted on User eXperience (UX), but is being attended by a very diverse set of Autodesk employees. It’s the first such summit since Maria Giudice joined the company from Facebook, which many of us hope (believe!) will usher in a new era for our products. I’ll be presenting a session on Wednesday regarding my experiments around UX for VR, particularly with respect to my View & Data API samples for Google Cardboard, culminating in a widescale demo of Vrok-It. Should be a lot of fun! Read more →

AutoCAD I/O v2

The AutoCAD I/O team has deployed version 2 of their API. For specific information on what’s new, check this page. As I’ll be talking about AutoCAD I/O at AU 2015, I thought it important to get to grips with the new version and understand how it differs from v1. I went ahead and updated Jigsawify.com to make use of the new API, so I’ll add my own commentary below on the changes that have been introduced. As a reminder, the full source code for Jigsawify.com is available on GitHub. To check out the specific migration changes, see this comparison... Read more →

JPF-DUCRET: Rebuilding CERN’s Globe using AutoCAD and hsbcad

When I was in Prague recently I spent some time with Alex Vinckier and Kris Riemslagh from hsbcad, an ADN member and provider of software for the offsite construction industry. I’ve corresponded and spoken with Alex and Kris a number of times during my time at Autodesk, but this was my first opportunity to meet them in person. They suggested I coordinate with another member of the hsbcad team – Alex’s twin brother, Karel – to visit to one of their best customers, who happens to be based just 40km from my home. So it was that Karel and... Read more →

Autodesk Neuchatel gets a new shared space

Today was an interesting day: in the morning Autodesk Neuchâtel opened a new common space, while in the afternoon I headed across with a development partner to meet an AutoCAD user doing some really interesting things with wood. More on that in the next post. For now, here are a few snaps of the new office space: I really like the new astroturf area. Although our facilities team didn’t seem very open to the idea of us installing 5-a-side goals at either end of it. In the corner we have a little Lab space, with a couple of 3D... Read more →

Autodesk DevDays 2015

Members of the Autodesk Developer Network have started receiving information on how to register for the upcoming series of DevDays being held around the world. Thanks largely to the positive experience of running Cloud Accelerators in different locations, the ADN team has shifted their thinking for this year’s tour: rather than visiting 15+ cities around the world, the team has reduced the number of locations to a few per geography but increased the amount of time being spent in each. 3-4 day Accelerators will be held in a number of cities adjacent to the more traditional DevDay events. This... Read more →

Le Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris

My best attempt to describe this technical, industrial museum is as a Mecca for Makers. It’s not a funky new space with a bunch of hipsters manning 3D printers – not that I have a problem with such spaces… I love those spaces :-) – rather it’s a shrine to all manner of human invention and creation since before the industrial revolution. The first thing I had to see on entering the museum, this morning, was Foucault’s Pendulum – with the museum playing a key part in Umberto Eco’s incredible novel of the same name, this was a “must... Read more →

Taking a break in Paris

I’ve headed to Paris with the family for a few days, this week. We’re staying in our first Airbnb-booked apartment in the 11th arrondissement. So far, so good! As the forecast for today looked a bit rainy, we decided to postpone our daytrip to Disneyland Paris until tomorrow and take the opportunity to visit the Louvre instead. Which turned out to be a good thing, as it’s closed on Tuesdays, and on Wednesday we’ve already planned to climb the Eiffel Tower. What fun. Anyway, as we were leaving the Louvre, walking to the île de la Cité to visit... Read more →

Displaying different entities in AutoCAD viewports using .NET

This is a problem that developers have been struggling with for some time, and it came up again at the recent Cloud Accelerator: how to control the display of AutoCAD geometry at a per-viewport level, perhaps to implement your own “isolate in a viewport” command. It’s certainly possible to control layer visibility at the viewport level, of course, but this is sometimes at odds with how users wish to use layers for their own purposes. An application may want to isolate geometry in a certain location from a number of layers, for instance, and it becomes cumbersome to hijack... Read more →