Through the Interface

Keynote presentations from the Forge DevCon

Over the last few days, recordings of several of the keynote presentations from the recent Forge DevCon have been made available online. More will be added over the coming days. Here’s the YouTube playlist, so you can check them out: To get a sense of the overall event, here’s a fun video (also in the above playlist, but worth calling out seperately) compiled from footage taken on the first day of the conference. To finish up, here’s a nice video (again, from the playlist :-) that was shown during the event and I think does a great job of... Read more →

10 years of Through the Interface

Last week this blog sailed through the 10th anniversary of its first post. I can’t believe how time has flown… posting 3 times a week for a decade has resulted in 1,448 posts, accumulating more than 6.2 million pageviews. I suppose when something’s so much fun you don’t really see time passing. Visually, the blog has changed a few times, over the years… (There’s a 4th theme that is still in the works, but I’ve hit a bit of a wall with the content transfer… I’ve noticed that backslashes have been filtered from the various code samples. I need... Read more →

Reflecting on the Forge DevCon

Today has been a strange day, to say the least. Waking up to the results of the UK’s EU referendum (also known as the “Brexit” vote) was a complete shock, and I’m yet to recover. The world has certainly changed but it’s going to be some time before the full impact is felt. Last week in SF I felt a little bit of this, although in a much more positive direction: that we were at a moment in time where things were about to change. Not immediately, and not for everyone, but I definitely came away with the sense... Read more →

Hurni, EPFL and CERN

After a hectic week in SF, I was looking forward to some relaxation, back in Switzerland, despite having a few visits planned for this week. It didn’t quite work out that way, but it was all for the best. On Tuesday I spent most of the day with Hurni Engineering, a very close partner based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the centre of the watchmaking industry – and the home of Le Corbusier and Louis Chevrolet – in Switzerland. I visited alongside Martin von Wartburg (our manufacturing industry salesperson for Switzerland) and Peter Schlipf (the Forge Partner Development Manager for EMEA).... Read more →

Getting room information for Revit models in the Forge Viewer

This question has come up more than a few times over the last year or so: I remember a number of Revit developers hitting it when creating Viewer applications at the accelerators in Munich and Prague, for instance. The problem appears to be that RVT files – when translated and loaded into the Viewer – do not have the concept of room objects: they’re just spaces. Which presents a challenge for developers who want to work at the room level. Last week I showed a demo during our “Autodesk Research and IoT” session, which showed room-centric navigation built into... Read more →

Second day at the Forge DevCon

With such a great first day at the Forge DevCon, how would the second (and final) day compare? Here it is, in pictures. :-) As for the first day, Jim Quanci, my long-time friend and former boss, acted as Master of Ceremonies. The first external presenter was Chris Anderson – who I mentioned yesterday. Chris is a very entertaining presenter, and talked about the evolution of the UAV industry. I love Chris’s vision for how drones should evolve: it aligns perfectly with mine. I was very happy to see Thiago da Costa speaking next. Thiago was co-founder of Lagoa,... Read more →

First day at the Forge DevCon

It was an amazing, whirlwind first day at the first ever Forge DevCon. I was there at 7am to put the finishing touches on the very cool Autodesk VR experience in the exhibit hall. The day’s session kicked off with a keynote by Amar Hanspal and a number of other great presenters. I was really pleased with how our VR stand came together. Merten Stroetzel and Hans Kellner – colleagues in the Office of the CTO – provided their deep technical expertise, while JJ Stott and Clementine Joly did an amazing job with their demos. Here’s the crew getting... Read more →

Arrived in SF for the Forge DevCon

It was a great weekend of football at Autodesk’s annual tournament – this time nicely closely to home in Zurich. The Neuchâtel team did really well in the group round, as in recent years: we came top of Group C, which turned out to be the “group of death” – two teams we beat went on to finish 1st (England) and 3rd (VP Staff). Our goalkeeper – and our rock-solid defence – didn’t concede a single goal during any of the matches, until we ended up being knocked out by Barcelona on penalties in the quarter-finals. So it goes... Read more →

Updates to the Forge platform in advance of the DevCon

In anticipation of next week’s first Forge DevCon, the Forge platform has just been updated. Here’s a quick look at what’s new and changed: You’ll notice there’s a new Data Management API, which allows you to access data stored in A360, Fusion 360 and Autodesk’s Object Storage Service. This is going to make it much easier to keep things simple and consistent when developing applications requiring access to design data. The Model Derivative API is another new API that does a few different things. Firstly it allows you to translate models into SVF – which is consumed by the... Read more →

Autodesk Research and IoT

One of the projects I’ve been working on – alongside Simon Breslav, a colleague from Autodesk Research Toronto – is a prototype, web-based client for our IoT back-end. I’ll be demoing it next week at the Forge DevCon. It uses Forge’s viewer component to provide access to sensor readings from within a 3D model. Here are a few sequences of images to give you an idea of what it does. It’s still early days, but we’re steadily working towards feature parity with the desktop-based Project Dasher. The first sequence shows how you can view the sensors in a building... Read more →

TEDx Portand talk on generative design and human augmentation

Following up from last week’s post, which included a brief video showing where we’re headed with generative design, today’s post highlights a speech by my colleague in Autodesk’s Office of the CTO (OCTO), Maurice Conti. I’ve mentioned Maurice before: he has an Applied Research team working on Pier 9 that is currently hiring a Machine Learning + Robotics researcher. Maurice gave a speech at TEDx Portland entitled “The Future of Human Augmentation”. It looks at how we’re being augmented, not only by computational systems (helping us think) but by robotic systems (helping us make) and by a digital nervous... Read more →

The Future of Design

I was just sent this short video that captures the essence of the Dreamcatcher project beautifully. Be sure to check it out if you're interested in what Autodesk Research is up to in the field of generative design. You won’t regret it. Exciting stuff! Read more →

Google Cardboard VR at the Forge DevCon

My friend and colleague on the ADN team, Lisa Senauke, helped get a bunch of special-branded VR viewers for the upcoming Forge DevCon. If you’re coming along and don’t get one from attending my class, be sure to swing by the exhibit hall and pick one up. This is the latest “Google Cardboard”-style device from our friends at DODOcase and should even fit 6” smartphones (a problem with the previous generation). They look really cool, even if I do say so myself (I spent a few wild hours inside PhotoShop to create the layout, believe it or not). A... Read more →