Through the Interface

VRistmas is coming

At Autodesk we’re in the process of equipping a number of our offices around the world with high-end VR showrooms. San Francisco and Boston are already set-up with a number of others currently in progress. It seems likely that Autodesk Neuchatel is going to be one of the next ones to come online, which is a source of great excitement to me, at least. As part of that effort, we’ve placed orders for two Silverdraft Demon systems as well as two HTC Vive Business Editions. The first Vive arrived yesterday: If you were at the Forge DevCon, you’ll already... Read more →

First videos from the Forge Hackathon

The Autodesk App Store Forge and Fusion 360 Hackathon is in full swing. It’s running for another month (until October 31st), so if you’re interested in earning some money for publishing apps to the Autodesk App Store, there’s still time to register. The webcasts being broadcast as part of the Hackathon are of value to people who aren’t interested in participating, this time around, of course. Here are the first three – there’s another on the Forge Viewer API scheduled for later today. Happy viewing! Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD leader with directional text using .NET

I’m sure some of you will be relieved to see I can still (more or less) manage to write code for AutoCAD… the last few days I’ve been feeling quite under-the-weather, so today’s post is a little bit of “comfort code”: sometimes while you’re brain is struggling to handle the unfamiliar, it’s very happy to tackle the familiar. At least that was the plan, and the reason I decided to tackle this recent question from Thomas Heitz: I would like to write an code to change automatically the structure label style while dragging the label. So I created two... Read more →

Yesterday’s AR Meetup in Lausanne

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Cyrille and I were heading across to Lausanne to host an AR Meetup. It’s our third Meetup for this particular group: the first was in the Autodesk office in Neuchatel, while the second and third have been held at the excellent Studio Banana. This one was really fun: between Cyrille and I we had three HoloLens devices for people to try, which made for a really interesting event. Cyrille kicked off proceedings with a discussion of AR and VR in general, and where things stand right now. Key Kawamura – from Studio Banana... Read more →

AR, MoCap and Drones

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... Read more →

What’s up with Autodesk and HoloLens?

A lot of people are asking me about HoloLens at the moment. And I really do mean a lot. This is cool – people are clearly excited about the possibilities of the technology – but it also means I’m spending quite a bit of time adjusting people’s expectations about what they can do currently with HoloLens and Autodesk software. I decided to write this blog post – describing where we are today – mainly in an attempt to answer the questions I’m receiving about HoloLens and Autodesk. If you’re visiting this post, sometime in the future, bear in mind... Read more →

Toronto and Boston

I arrived in Toronto on Sunday afternoon. Customs and immigration was extremely efficient – I just had to wait a while for my bag (one of these days I’ll manage to do an 8-day trip with just a carry-on, but not this time). Getting into downtown Toronto was a breeze, too, with the UPExpress from Pearson Airport to Union Station (I’m guessing UP stands for Union-Pearson). It even has free wi-fi – a blessing for international roamers such as myself. Despite its size – and Toronto is *huge* – the downtown area is surprisingly walkable. I don’t have a... Read more →

Micro16, AAG and Monolith

On Saturday I gave a couple of VR presentations at Micro16, an exhibition and conference held at Microcity, a (relatively) new technical hub in Neuchatel that houses part of EPFL. [I always pronounce Microcity with stress on the second syllable, much as Will Ferrel does when pronouncing “Metrocity” in the movie Megamind (so that it rhymes with “atrocity”). Anyway – it’s just a (formerly) private joke shared with my wife and kids.] I’d been invited by a local organisation called Enigma & Indicium, which organises vocational workshops for young adults. The two sessions were attended by people aged from... Read more →

SINDEX 16: Cuddly robots are the future

After the fun of participating in last week’s Hackathon, I headed across to Bern for SINDEX 2016. SINDEX is a biannual exhibition focused on industrial automation. I went to the last one and found it really interesting – well worth going back to, especially given my involvement in IoT and my interest in robotics. The event is probably a smaller, Swiss version of the Hannover Messe, although I’m only really guessing as I’ve never been there. It was also a good chance to meet with a few companies who will be exhibiting their products at the upcoming Design Night... Read more →

The Autodesk App Store Forge and Fusion 360 Hackathon

Hot on the heels of our own, internal Hackathon (although, strictly speaking, this one started before it) there’s another external Hackathon running until the end of October. This one’s about developing apps using Forge or Fusion 360 and submitting said apps to the Autodesk App Store. The event really has two distinct parts: A series of webinars and Q&A sessions where you can learn about Forge and Fusion 360 development These are free and open to all: there’s absolutely no commitment needed to attend An online Hackathon with a financial incentive for you to submit your Forge or Fusion... Read more →

HoloGuide: an Autodesk Hackathon project

Over the last few days we’ve held Autodesk’s first internal, global Hackathon. I started off by not wanting to join a team – I did sign up as an “evangelist”, which it turns out means I’m also a judge – but in the end I decided to create a simple HoloLens application. And then Jeremy Tammik suggested we join forces, so we actually were a team, all of a sudden. From my side I focused on creating the HoloLens application – which receives path information from somewhere and displays that to the user – as well as the 2D... Read more →

The 2%

As mentioned yesterday, on Saturday my second son and I got up at the crack of dawn to drive across to the Alpine town of Grindelwald. It’s the third time I’ve made this particular pilgrimage in the last four years (last year I had a conflicting event in the UK) and it’s become something of a rite of passage for my kids: as they turn 10 they come with their Dad and his silly car to meet lots of other people with silly cars. The event is the M3W Jungfrau Treffen, organised by Laurens and Rineke, a Dutch couple... Read more →

Augmenting Reality in La Chaux de Fonds

I’ve been working with a number of local organisations to help prepare the 25th anniversary party we’re holding for Autodesk Switzerland in October. One of them is Robosphère, an association in La Chaux de Fonds focused on increasing awareness of the field of robotics. When I was there chatting with Serge Bringolf – the chairman of Robosphère– a few weeks ago, I showed Serge the HoloLens demo I’d been working on. It included a robot, after all. This was Serge’s first exposure to mixed reality and he thought it’d be a good topic for a presentation at one of... Read more →