Through the Interface

It’s time to Play!

There’s a new WebGL-based technology being developed by Autodesk and it’s completely awesome. And you can request access to it today. Project Play has been in development for some time. It has some shared lineage with the Smithsonian X 3D Explorer – although I’m not sure to what extent, if any, they share code – and it’s the viewing technology used by millions (?) around the world to explore the ReCapped Apollo 11 Command Module. But this technology is about way more than just viewing static models. It’s a full node-based editor that allows you to create rich 3D... Read more →

21 years

I was a little surprised when LinkedIn reported my 21st anniversary at Autodesk, a couple of weeks’ ago. I eventually realised it was because the middle of my month of starting had been chosen to notify my connections of this particular anniversary (LinkedIn doesn’t have the specific date, I suppose). Anyway, it turns out today’s the actual anniversary. 21 short years’ ago, I joined Autodesk Ltd. in Guildford, Surrey. Since then I’ve worked for Autodesk Development S.à.r.l. (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), Autodesk India Private Ltd. (Bangalore, India), and Autodesk, Inc. (San Rafael, California). But all within the umbrella of life at... Read more →

ETHZ, EPFL and all that jazz

This week has been a little hectic, once again. Yesterday I spent the morning back across at ETH Zurich, speaking with members of the Block Research Group about Forge, Dynamo and HoloLens. They’ve just moved into a brand new building labelled HIB – where the various schools at ETH focusing on architecture from a technological perspective will be co-located – but as it’s so new it’s yet to be sign-posted. I eventually did find it, but not without asking for directions from 5 different people. Inside the ceiling is pretty cool: they’ve used a combination of skylights for natural... Read more →

My entry for Autodesk’s first Global Hackathon: a HoloLens-based tool for navigating low visibility environments

We have an internal company Hackathon being held at Autodesk locations around the world on September 6th and 7th. The theme for the event is “What’s Next?” and there are variety of sub-themes under which the hacks can fall: Computer as collaborator Future of product interfaces Internet of Things Social good / Sustainability The future of anything else I signed up some time ago to be an “evangelist” for the event, which means I’m a resource for people in the local Neuchatel office should they have questions about VR/AR and IoT (which fall under the second and third sub-themes,... Read more →

Using HoloLens to display diagnostic information for building components

I’ve been looking at using HoloLens for more “serious” applications (yes, beyond dancing robots :-). One simple prototype I’ve worked on over the last few weeks – once again with the help of Tom Eriksson, who did another stellar job transforming the CAD data into a good-looking Unity model – is to show an electrical transformer and allow the user to pinpoint a technical problem inside it for the purposes of (hopefully predictive) maintenance. Here’s a quick demo video, showing a prototype where we open up the electrical transformer and show its insides before scaling and exploding it and... Read more →

Caching the results of long browser-based operations in Local Storage

In the IoT-related (and Forge Viewer-based) prototype I’m spending most of my time working on, we have a long startup operation that instantiates a number of arrays of data with information derived from the BIM. This operation only really needs to be done once per model – every user will get exactly the same information from the model that’s loaded in their own browser instance – but we were calculating it on every load of the model in the Forge Viewer. The question I’d like to look at in this post is the appropriate method for memoization of this... Read more →

Our dancing HoloLens robot, now viewable in Germany

Just out of curiosity, this morning I decided to go and check the YouTube video we saw in the last post. I’d realised from my messing around with the Star Wars opening crawl that if you include copyrighted content in a video, then sometimes ads get included, too, with the proceeds benefiting the copyright owner. Which is absolutely fair enough, as far as I’m concerned. What I hadn’t realised is that some copyrighted content isn’t viewable in certain countries, presumably at the request of the copyright owner. So due to its use of a Chemical Brothers track, my last... Read more →

Making our HoloLens robot dance!

As promised, way back when we started this series of posts looking at various Windows Holographic platform capabilities to build an app that displays an animated ABB industrial robot inside HoloLens, here’s the part where we make it dance. :-) During Autodesk Switzerland’s 25th anniversary party in late October, people will be able to give the app a try and hopefully see the robot dancing along to whatever tunes the DJ plays. Let’s talk a bit about how the system works… Quite early on I decided against doing the additional audio processing directly on the HoloLens device itself. So... Read more →

Adding a context menu command to objects in the Forge Viewer

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time working on our “Dasher 360” prototype, recently. Which is, of course, based on the Forge Viewer. A simple – but handy – feature I added today is to add a context menu item to be displayed when objects are selected – and right-clicked – inside the Viewer. In my case I wanted to prototype a possible workflow for a “Send to HoloLens” capability: the feature itself isn’t ready (that’s what you might call an extreme understatement), but I thought I’d add the menu item in preparation for something being implemented. Here’s... Read more →

Scaling our Unity model in HoloLens

This was a fun piece of functionality and super easy to add. I’d seen a few HoloLens demos where you can scale the model up and down using “bigger” and “smaller” voice commands. There’s even some code in the HoloLens Toolkit that does it. But until I’d actually added it to our robot application, I hadn’t really understood how interesting it was. You can scale a model down and have it sit on your desktop… …or you can scale it up to 10x its realworld size and inspect it in unbelievable close-up mode. From the inside! (Although in fairness... Read more →

Adding spatial sound to our Unity model in HoloLens – Part 3

After the first two parts of this series, where we looked at items 1 & 2 on the below list, it’s time to tackle item 3: A single sound is assigned to our robot When the robot stops completely, so does the sound The same sound is assigned to each of the robot’s parts When each part stops moving, so does the sound for that part A different sound is assigned to each of the robot’s parts When each part stops moving, so does the sound for that part As I mentioned last time, I was fairly happy with... Read more →

Happy August 1st! (It’s the Swiss National Day)

We’re up in the beautiful Swiss town of Adelboden, our favourite local winter destination but also somewhere we try our best to visit in summer, too. We’re here to enjoy the mountains and celebrate the Swiss National Day. (While I’m not personally Swiss – I hold a UK passport – the rest of my family is, and since the EU referendum I’ve decided it’s time for me to join them.) We’ve had a great few days up here. The weather has been mixed, this summer, but that also makes for spectacular lighting conditions. The other day it even seemed... Read more →