Through the Interface

Merry HoloXmas!

It’s foggy and grey here in Switzerland, but thanks to the joy of mixed reality it’s always snowing when you want it to be. If only it worked on the slopes! All the very best to this blog’s readers for the festive season. Have a wonderful, relaxing break – those of you who are taking time off – and I’ll see you back here in 2017! Read more →

The Construction Launchpad from AU 2016

My biggest session from this year’s Autodesk University – and the only one that was recorded – has just gone live on the AU website. The segment I’m part of starts 53 minutes into the recording, while I personally start talking at around the 1 hour mark, going through to 1h10. It was an interesting experience, talking to 1,000 people in a single session. While the lead up was a little stressful, I’m certainly happy I did it and – looking back at the recording – feel pretty good about managing to get the main points across reasonably clearly.... Read more →

An award for the Autodesk Research website

Noble Studios, the contractor who helped develop AutodeskResearch.com, has won a Platinum MarCom Award for the project. The site is indeed really cool: head on over if you haven’t been there in a while. I have on my list of things to do – let’s now call it a New Year’s Resolution for 2017 – to start blogging over there, too. But there are plenty of interesting things to see even before that happens. ;-) Just for instance, check out some of the publications listed for the awesome Jos Stam, as well as some of his own entertaining blog... Read more →

Progress on our VR room

Things are moving ahead regarding the VR room we’re building at Autodesk in Neuchatel. Come mid-January we’ll be ready to welcome guests to the Neuchatel office and get them excited about the potential of applying Virtual Reality technology in the design space. This week we had Joel Pennington visit from the Autodesk LIVE team in San Francisco: he trained a number of people from the Neuchatel office on how to use the VR system and went through demos that showcase a variety of Autodesk tools and technologies. The breadth of demos we now have available is impressive and getting... Read more →

Video of Autodesk Design Nights around the world

I was just sent this video (thanks, Aurelia!) featuring scenes from the amazing Design Nights Autodesk has held around the world. Yes, including the one we organised here in Neuchatel, Switzerland. I’ve had a pretty hectic start to the week, so this is (unusually, as it’s Wednesday) my first post. But I have quite a bit to talk about, so it won’t be my last. Right now I’m heading off to see Rogue One at the cinema: once again a Star Wars film is being released in French-speaking Switzerland two full days ahead of its US release date, but... Read more →

Silver linings

It turns there is a downside to choosing a small airline based in a small airport. My happiness at discovering both the Bern airport and the airline flying out of it was considerably lessened when my flight home was cancelled without explanation, last night. After much shared confusion with my fellow travellers, I ended up being offered a room in airport hotel and an 8am flight out today. So it was that I got back on the phone with Peter Schlipf and ended up joining the Forge Accelerator attendees for one last dinner at Fugazi No. 15. After the... Read more →

HoloLens and Forge at the Munich Accelerator

It’s been a challenging few days of “acceleration” in Munich. We’ve had a large, highly motivated crowd, which has definitely been a highlight. On the lowlight side, during the last 24 hours we’ve had our first major outage of the Forge platform. A core service, ACM – our Access Control Manager – went down early yesterday morning (for us here in Europe). This impacted both the Data Management and Model Derivative APIs, without which you can’t really use the Forge viewer, for example, as well as various other cloud-connected products such as Fusion 360 and Collaboration for Revit. Thankfully... Read more →

The European DevDay in Munich

On Sunday I flew out to Munich for our annual European DevDay. For the first time I chose to fly from Bern’s airport in Belp, which is a short 45-minute drive from my home. It’s a small airport, so I could park right next to the terminal and walk a short distance to the check-in. Here’s the plane I took – an Embraer turbo-prop. Checking into the Ramada Hotel in Munich, I realised I’d stayed here before for one of the Autodesk Soccer tournaments. I’d forgotten how long the corridors were, and I was unfortunately assigned a room right... Read more →

Dasher 360: Give it a try!

During the lead up to Autodesk University 2016, held a few weeks ago in Las Vegas, we made a number of key updates to Dasher 360. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Dasher 360 is Project Dasher re-imagined for the web using Autodesk’s Forge platform. Here’s a video that shows many of the enhancements we’ve made in recent months: Aside from my AU2016 class on Dasher – and how we used Forge to implement it – Alex Tessier and I presented Dasher 360 during the Construction Launch Pad event in front of around 1,000 attendees. Our... Read more →