I’ve had the pleasure of having Cyrille Fauvel from the Forge team with me in Neuchatel, this week. I’ve worked with Cyrille for many years, and we continue to be interested in very similar technology areas (particularly AR/VR, IoT and robotics/UAVs). So we inevitably have lots to talk about. :-)
So it’s been a fun-packed few days: on Wednesday we spent the afternoon at Microcity at the Innovation World Cup Conference which was focused primarily on wearable computing and IoT. There were a number of presentations both from established platform providers such as STMicroelectronics and BSH (Bosch) and from Swiss-based startups such as Xsensio, GaitUp, Pryv and Poken. One of the most interesting, in some ways, was the last: a presentation by 3db Technologies, who have created a secure proximity verification system, mainly with a view of preventing people from hacking keyless entry systems for cars and buildings. What’s – in my opinion – most interesting about their technology is that it could be used to track assets inside buildings (and presumably on construction sites) with an accuracy of <15cm.
We had to rush off at the end of the conference – missing the networking event – to get set up for an evening workshop Cyrille had volunteered to run for Enigma & Indicium. The workshop dealt with using a motion capture (MoCap) system to capture performances and then Maya to animate characters with the captured information. During the workshop each of the attendees had a chance to record their movements via MoCap, and Cyrille showed how this could be applied to rigged characters in Maya. There wasn’t enough time to actually have the kids choose their own characters and animate them – this is something we’ll do remotely, after the fact – and we also wanted to showan integration with HoloLens that Cyrille had prototyped. There were technical challenges, on the night, but Cyrille was able to get this working today.
Here’s a quick video we recorded in the office, just now:
This isn’t meant to be a professional MoCap pre-viz solution… if that’s something you’re interested in, be sure to check out this very cool demo from Jasper Brekelmans, an ADN partner, showing an integration between MotionBuilder and HoloLens:
I’ve been a fan of Jasper’s work since Kinect first came out: he used it for MoCap, while I focused on integrating it with AutoCAD.
Today Cyrille and I were in the Autodesk office, but we’re about to head across to Lausanne for an AR Meetup that Cyrille runs. We’ll be talking about the various HoloLens projects we’re both working on.
One last (very selfish) reason Cyrille’s trip has been most welcome: he was recently in the US and was able to bring across a 3DR Solo that I bought months ago in a July 4th sale.
We’ve already taken it out for a spin and so far the Solo seems to be just the drone I’ve been looking for: it requires very little piloting skill and you can write code to automate it (DroneKit being one mechanism I’ve been looking forward to diving into). More on this soon!
