Through the Interface

Happy 35th birthday, Autodesk

Autodesk turned 35 years old, today. To commemorate this event, Shaan has suggested we all wear our oldest Autodesk shirt. I know I have an R14 ARX T-shirt somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it (it was always about 5 sizes too big, so it may well have been thrown out). The best I could do were these two polo shirts from circa 2000. I’m not sure which is oldest, so here they both are. I’d joined the company five years before that, in 1995, but was based in Europe: a notoriously merchandising-starved continent, back then. It wasn’t... Read more →

Our VR room is ready!

Today is a good day. After long months of preparation, the VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel is up and running! We’re still waiting for a sofa and chair for waiting guests to relax in, but otherwise all is finally ready. Here’s a quick video I shot to show you around the room. I spent probably a day and a half this week struggling with why the Vives weren’t working properly. The tracking was fine – I could see the supposedly mirrored views just fine – but the Vive displays themselves were blank. At first I thought I’d made a... Read more →

Implementing tooltips for individual points in a point cloud in the Forge viewer

In the last post we talked about a recent optimization to Dasher 360, where we implemented a point cloud rather than individual SVG-based markers for our various sensors. As mentioned, last time, this was pretty straightforward to get working, but did add some complexity: rather than having seperate DOM-resident markers – which can easily have separate tooltips assigned – we now have a single object and need to be able to display tooltips when individual points in the cloud are hovered over. Here’s the basic algorithm we used to determine when an individual sensor was being hovered over: Implement... Read more →

Optimizing Dasher 360: using a point cloud to display sensor markers

At the Forge Accelerator in Munich, back in December, while I spent most of my time answering what questions I could about Forge I also showed up with a question of my own. In the original prototype of Dasher 360 we used code from a very helpful sample that showed how to add SVG markers to the DOM inside the Forge viewer. The original sample showed this in the context of adding markup to a model: on our side we wanted it to mark the location of sensors in the model. While this was great for small numbers of... Read more →

Autodesk Neuchatel’s VR room will soon be open for business!

The work is nearly complete on the VR showroom in Autodesk’s Neuchatel office. Before the big unveiling – which will probably happen early next week, although it’ll probably be a month before the last furniture shows up – I thought I’d share a few snaps taken during the complete build process. Here’s a photo of the original space. The two adjoining walls in the far corner are just partition walls, at this stage. Independently of the room being built, the decision was made to make these walls more permanent. So the first phase was to build permanent walls on... Read more →

An update on Autodesk’s VR activities

I received an email from a development partner yesterday checking in on Autodesk’s VR offerings. It occurred to me that while I’ve spoken about them at the DevDays in the US and Europe, I haven’t posted anything here. So here’s some fairly up-do-date information on what technologies Autodesk has in the VR space. The way I’ve been tending to classify VR offerings in general is around the “distance from the metal”: i.e. how much (relatively speaking) of the software stack does the executing code need to go through to get down to the display hardware. This is a somewhat... Read more →

Autodesk University has a new neighbour, the Forge DevCon!

The big news of the last week or so is that the Forge DevCon – which was held at Fort Mason in San Francisco in 2016 – is moving to Las Vegas for 2017. It will take place on November 13 & 14, i.e. Monday and Tuesday of the Autodesk University week (which in recent years has been when the DevDay and DevLab has happened). This is a good thing, in my opinion. Somewhat selfishly it’ll mean less travel for those of us coming across from Europe, but it will also make AU a more compelling, developer-centric event. I’ve... Read more →

Back in Munich

I’m once again across in the fine city of Munich. I flew again from Bern’s local airport, this time with a couple of colleagues from other parts of Autodesk. Here’s a quick photo I took from the window as the sun was setting over the Alps. It was nice to be above the fog for a while! We’re attending an internal training called ABLE – the Autodesk Business Leadership Experience – which educates employees about competitive strategy and how it is used by – and impacts – companies such as Autodesk. Here’s Jon Pittman, our VP of Corporate Strategy,... Read more →

Striving for connection

Happy New Year, everyone! This is my first day back after two full fantastic weeks off. We were up in the Bernese Oberland for the full 16 days and even managed to ski (or – in my case – snowboard) for 13 of them, despite an initial lack of snow. At the beginning of the break the conditions were like this: But thankfully by the end it was more like this: As a bit of an experiment, I’ve started to use the place where we stay in the mountains as a small-scale test-bed for home automation: as a holiday... Read more →