Through the Interface

A busy day at EPFL

Yesterday I was back at EPFL to visit a number of different people/teams. The main purpose of the trip was to meet with Klaus Schönenberger and Solomzi Makohliso from EssentialTech: an EPFL organization focused on reducing poverty by encouraging transfer of essential technology to developing nations. Examples of technology that has been transferred by the programme are a safe, affordable X-ray technology and a protective suit for working with Ebola patients. Image © 2016 EPFL Alain Herzog The delivery mechanism for the technology will either be an existing company or a startup, depending on the situation. The work EssentialTech... Read more →

Speak at the Autodesk Forge DevCon 2017: call for papers now open

The “call for papers” is now open for the next edition of the Forge DevCon being held at Fort Mason in San Francisco on June 27-28, 2017. Here’s a quick reminder of how the first DevCon went down, to whet your appetite. You can already pre-register your interest in attending, but I’m currently more focused on getting potential speakers to sign up to talk. I’ll once again be running the AR/VR track (as well as the associated exhibition area) for the event, so if you feel you have something to share in this space, please go ahead and submit... Read more →

Google Earth VR | 3D Rudder

It’s Friday – and a holiday in the US – so it’s time for some fun… Some weeks ago I received an interesting device through the post. It’s called the 3D Rudder and is made by a startup in Marseille. They’ve basically created a foot-controlled joystick with three degrees of freedom, so you can control roll, pitch and yaw, all while keeping your hands free. The makers of the 3D Rudder originally intended it for navigating in 3D design applications – one of the founders is an architect by background – so their interest in me playing with it... Read more →

From tomorrow: meet Mimus at the Design Museum

Madeline Gannon’s exhibit – featuring Mimus, the industrial robot that reacts to (and even interacts with) visitors – opens tomorrow (November 24th, 2016) at the Design Museum in London. I mentioned Madeline’s project in a recent post as I’d had the chance to interact with it at the Autodesk Boston BUILD space. There’s also an interesting article discussing the project that’s just been posted over on In the Fold. Here’s a video describing the motivation behind the project in more depth: If you’re interested in how Mimus looks when not surrounded by glass, here’s the video I recorded when... Read more →

VR/AR, Generative Design and Robots at AU2016

As usual, this year’s Autodesk University was a crazy tech-fest. Here’s a lightning round-up of some of the cool stuff I saw, through the lens of my personal interests and the small amount of spare time I managed to spend exploring. Firstly, AR and VR were everywhere. The Future of Making Things Pavilion had 11 different VR booths, some of which were connected for collaborative experiences. I didn’t get to try any (argh!) but I’m told I’ll be getting access to the experiences for our VR installation in Neuchatel, in due course. One of my favourite projects in recent... Read more →

Autodesk University 2016: keynotes and classes

Tuesday was my big day at AU2016: my colleagues, Alex Tessier, and I delivered a short segment during the Construction Launchpad session attended by roughly 1,000 people. This shot gives some idea of the size of the audience. I think it’s probably the first time I’ve delivered a session with a camera showing me in close-up on the big screen. Here are a few tweets from the audience, showing what it probably looked like. Collaborative design review - Autodesk research using Microsoft Halolens. @keanw #au2016 pic.twitter.com/WoAdpa7otE— Clay Helm (@HelmClay) November 15, 2016 Visualising data using @Autodesk Dasher 360 as... Read more →

Dancing Robot takes the stage at the Las Vegas DevDay

Yesterday Autodesk held its first Developer Day of the 2016 season with a pre-conference event ahead of Autodesk University 2016 in Las Vegas. My old pals at the Developer Network team had asked me to participate, so I came along and presented a session on Virtual and Augmented Reality at Autodesk. The main event was primarily about Forge, natureally enough. It’s great to see how the platform’s evolving, over time. During the VR/AR session we spent time looking at various VR-related technologies available from Autodesk, and then demoed a couple of AR prototypes Cyrille Fauvel and I had created.... Read more →

My plans for Autodesk University 2016

On Saturday I’ll be flying out to Las Vegas for the latest Autodesk University. I thought I was going to have a relatively lightweight AU, this year – I have just one class to deliver – but that’s not how it turned out, in the end. My first big engagement is at the ADN pre-conference, where Cyrille Fauvel and I will be talking about VR and AR at Autodesk. It’s going to be a fun session – typically we get around 500 attendees at the DevDay, so it’s a big crowd. While it’s hard to demo these technologies to... Read more →

Intelligent Building Systems in Paris

On Monday I hopped on the train for Paris – which takes just under 4 hours, from Neuchatel to Gare de Lyon – to attend the Intelligent Building Systems exhibition as a guest of Schneider Electric. Leaving Neuchatel the weather was cold but stunning: Going through the Jura, though, we quickly found ourselves in snow. I arrived in Paris in time to meet up for dinner with an old friend. I also managed to get a fair amount of sleep before Tuesday’s early start to take the Metro across to Porte de Versailles. The event itself ended up being... Read more →

Using the Forge Viewer at the world’s biggest WebVR hackathon

The world’s biggest WebVR hackathon – Virtuleap – kicked off on Thursday of last week. Before we talk about the hackathon, let’s discuss why it’s an exciting time for this technology… WebVR is exploding on a number of fronts, most of which relate to the industry as a whole, while one is a little more Autodesk-centric. Oculus recently announced support for WebVR – and a new ReactVR framework – in their Carmel browser It was announced a whole month ago – which seems like ages, these days – but this is a significant milestone Google is launching WebVR support... Read more →

Autodesk LIVE in the Vive

I’ve finally found the time to get one of the new Demons bound to my service installed with Autodesk VRED, Revit and LIVE. I had some teething issues getting the HTC Vive to work: my rookie mistake was thinking I could connect it to a DisplayPort via a basic DP –> HDMI dongle. This was enough for the PC – and Steam VR – to detect it, but not enough for anything to show inside the HMD. After a phone consult with Merten Stroetzel, I fixed it by having it come off the DVI port (another option would be... Read more →

Removing context menu commands in the Forge Viewer

During last week’s Forge Accelerator, a developer wanted to strip the standard items from the context menu in his Forge Viewer application. We both searched for a while, until we found the answer: he’d been using this approach to add his own menu items – of course – but it turns out the exact same approach can be used to strip out unwanted items, too. The “context menu callback” receives a menu object that contains its various items: you can inspect them and remove the ones you don’t want, or even adopt a more brute-force approach as we’ve done... Read more →