Through the Interface

Tracks and classes posted for the Forge DevCon

The tracks have now been posted for the upcoming Forge DevCon in SF on June 15-16, 2016: Forge Basics AEC (including BIM and Generative Design) Manufacturing – Design Manufacturing ­– Making (including 3D printing and subtractive) Manufacturing – Manage (including PLM, ERP and more) Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Internet of Things Business Development To give people an idea of the content, we’ve pulled together about 35 class descriptions of the 60 or so we expect to schedule. I’m managing the VR/AR speaker track, so I’ve been spending time reaching out to and signing up speakers for the 8 or so... Read more →

Heading to Cuba

Tomorrow we’re heading on an extended* family trip to Cuba. My thanks to President Obama for timing his trip to finish just before ours (apparently it was all a bit hectic). * It’s an extended (2 week) trip with my extended (on my wife’s side) family, so I suppose it’s an extended2 family trip. I’ve always wanted to visit Cuba, so I’m really happy to be making this trip. We’ll be spending 10 days on Cayo Largo – mostly diving and snorkelling – with a couple of days in Havana on either side to soak up the culture. I... Read more →

AutoCAD 2017 for developers

Yesterday Autodesk announced the availability of AutoCAD 2017, code-named “Nautilus”. We use consecutive letters in the alphabet for AutoCAD code names, and as 2016 was “Maestro” it’s natural that 2017 would begin with an N. For those of you who’re wondering, the code name is indeed a reference to the graphics used for the AutoCAD R12 product. Here’s my R12 AutoLISP reference, where you can see the inspiration… To find out what’s new in AutoCAD 2017 from a product perspective, head on over to Heidi Hewett’s post on the AutoCAD blog or visit autodesk.com. You can also watch Mike... Read more →

Creating krpano scenes from A360 stereo panorama renderings – Part 4

Right then, time for the big reveal. We’ve had three parts in this series discussing one basic approach for aggregating stereo panoramas from A360 cloud rendering into a site that uses krpano. Today we’re going to see the code itself, and discuss where the project might go from here. If you’re more interested in this discussion, scroll down past the code. :-) Firstly, though, here’s a quick demo of the site, recorded using my Nexus 5X mobile phone. Something I like about the krpano viewer is that you can view in VR as well as non-VR mode, and tweak... Read more →

Creating krpano scenes from A360 stereo panorama renderings – Part 3

So far we’ve introduced this series and taken a look at the format of panoramic images both in A360 cloud rendering and in krpano. The next step – before publishing the code, which I’ll do at the beginning of next week – is to take a look at the XML format needed by the krpano viewer. For simplicity, we’re going to have a single, top-level krpano scene that links to scenes created for the various stereo panos that we’ve downloaded and processed from A360 cloud rendering. This top-level scene is copied from a sample scene provided by krpano, but... Read more →

Back to ETHZ to visit the Block Research Group

After a pretty late night on Monday – I stayed to help clear up after the evening Swiss Tech Talk – I managed to grab a few hours of sleep before getting up early, yesterday, to head across to Zurich for meetings at ETH. I’d been invited by Philipp Mueller (from our Education team) and Peter Schlipf (from ADN) to meet with a few different groups at ETH. I was happy to see Jeremy Tammik also came along for the first meeting. It’s that first meeting that I really wanted to talk about, today. It was with Dr Philippe... Read more →

My Swiss Tech Talk at Autodesk

Yesterday I had the honour of presenting a Swiss Tech Talk in Autodesk’s Neuchatel office. I’ve attended a number of these events over the last year or so – on such diverse topics as Bluetooth, IP issues related to the cloud and IoT, and the changing face of management consulting – so it was a great pleasure to be invited by the Swiss Tech Association to deliver a session on behalf of Autodesk. I figured the audience wouldn’t be interested in hearing about AutoCAD APIs – sure, I find this fascinating, but different strokes and all that – so... Read more →

Creating krpano scenes from A360 stereo panorama renderings – Part 2

In the last post we introduced the idea of a tool that can pull down stereo panoramas rendered in A360 and use them to create a local, aggregate scene for viewing in the Google Cardboard-compatible krpano viewer. Today we’re going to start looking at the specifics of such a tool, firstly by describing the structure of an A360 stereo panorama and how we can convert it to a format supported by krpano. You’re likely to have URLs in one of two formats for your A360-rendered stereo panoramas: http://pano.autodesk.com/pano.html?url=jpgs/15847dfd-ba8e-4397-9022-0fba2ea5ad19 This is a “Preview on your phone” URL, that isn’t published... Read more →

Creating krpano scenes from A360 stereo panorama renderings – Part 1

In these two recent posts we talked about my belief that untethered VR technologies, such as Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR, can be used to deliver really compelling design visualization experiences. This series will focus specifically on how to create a multi-scene VR experience using A360 cloud rendering and a panorama viewer called krpano. Let’s start by introducing krpano. This is a fairly powerful tool for creating, publishing and viewing panoramic experiences, whether 2D or 3D. The main focus appears to be 2D – the ability to work with VR scenes is (at the time of writing) only... Read more →

Morgan, Tesla, VR and IoT at the 86th Geneva Motor Show

After a nice week on the slopes – children in Neuchâtel have their annual “semaine blanche” around March 1st, the day the canton celebrates becoming a republic – I eased back into work this morning by heading across to Geneva for the 86th “Salon de l’Auto”. I was there when the doors opened so I could make it home for a late lunch. As usual there was plenty of shiny on display at this year’s show. I liked the fact that I could watch the reflection in the paintwork of a physical car of a video that was certainly... Read more →

VR for design visualization – Part 2

Thanks for the positive responses to the last post. I can see it’s an interesting topic for people, so I’m going to stick with it for a bit. I promised some kind of categorisation of where I see existing VR solutions in the design visualization space. These are fairly broad categories that focus on the technology, rather than the user scenario, so hopefully I’ve managed to cover the main ones. Tethered (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift) Realtime graphics Game engine runtime * Lots of people are using this approach, today. One of the main issues continues to be around the... Read more →

VR for design visualization – Part 1

I've been thinking about Virtual Reality, of late, as I’ve been working on an internal project that requires VR to deliver architectural visualizations. As I’ve been thinking about it, I thought I’d write about it. Trust me, it’s better than me writing about something I’m not thinking about. :-) The state of the art "If you want quality VR, you need an HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift." If I had a dollar every time someone said this to me, I'd be able to afford a round of venti lattes at Starbucks. The prevalent thinking is that you need... Read more →