Through the Interface

Surface shading in Dasher 360 based on real sensor data

I mentioned in last week’s post describing the March update to Dasher 360 that we had temporarily removed the fake surface shading animation – something I talked about way back when – from the public site in order to focus on something based on actual sensor data. Well, we’ve made quicker progress than expected – largely thanks to the genius of my colleague Simon Breslav, who’s a complete GLSL wizard – allowing me to give you all a sneak peek of what’s about to go into the public demo: As you can see we have an adjustable range on... Read more →

Autodesk Munich’s VR Center of Excellence

I’ve talked a little about the VR room we have at Autodesk in Neuchatel. Our colleagues in Munich have been building something similar, yet on a totally different level: they’ve just officially opened their “VR Center of Excellence”. And excellent it truly is – check out this video to see for yourself: A lot of what you might assume is post-production in the above video was actually performed in real-time. And at 4K resolution, too! Extremely impressive stuff. I really like what the Munich team has done. I’m hoping I’ll get the chance to poke my nose in on... Read more →

March update of Dasher 360

This week we rolled out a significant update to Dasher 360. Those of you who follow this blog regularly will already have seen the implementation details for a number of the features in this release, from point cloud-based sensor dots to “Kiosk Mode”. I’ve linked to those posts wherever possible. We’ll take a look at the changes in terms of Dasher 360’s Forge viewer extensions, which mostly correspond to items in the Dasher 360 toolbar to the left of the page: Here are the major changes since the December release. If you want to skip the details, just open... Read more →

AutoCAD 2018 has been released

While I’m not spending much time working with AutoCAD, these days, I’ve been waiting impatiently for the release of AutoCAD 2018 (codenamed “Omega”). There’s one key feature, in particular, that I’ve been waiting for – but more on that later. From a user perspective you can find information on the new release in this blog post and this preview guide. There’s also a subset covered in this intro video, if that’s your preference: Here are a few notes on the major user features. Some of these features were already part of the 2017.1 release, but many people will be... Read more →

AEC Hackathon is coming to Munich (and so am I)

I’ve been interested in participating in – or at least attending – an AEC Hackathon for a couple of years now. I was first introduced to them during the VR Hackathons I attended in SF in 2014 and 2015 (Damon, Greg and Paul, who help organize the AEC Hackathons, were also organizing/involved in/attending the VR ones). There are a number of AEC Hackathons planned for Europe over the coming months, so I’m happy to say I’ll finally get my chance. I’ve been asked to present at the first – which is in Munich from March 31st – April 2nd... Read more →

Implementing a demo mode inside the Forge viewer – Part 3

In this final (for now, anyway) part of the series, we’re going to look at the approach taken in the Dasher 360 kiosk mode to loop the demo indefinitely (although with variations, as mentioned last time) until someone interrupts by moving the mouse. The first piece of this is to track the mouse. We do this by attaching an event handler to ‘mousemove’. Here’s the TypeScript code we’re using: onMouseMove = (event: any): void => { this._canvasX = event.canvasX || event.clientX; this._canvasY = event.canvasY || event.clientY; if (this._startX !== null && this._startY !== null && this._inKioskMode && (Math.abs(this._canvasX -... Read more →

Implementing a demo mode inside the Forge viewer – Part 2

Now that we’ve seen how to move a fake cursor across the screen, let’s talk about how best to use this technique to implement a demo mode for your Forge viewer-based application. Something I mentioned last time was that – for our purposes – this code needs to be fairly adaptable, whether for different views, models or screen configurations. It also needs to be easy for us to modify or extend. Inside Dasher 360 we’ve implemented a number of different extensions. Many of these have their own UI, typically launched by a button. One of the first things I... Read more →

Implementing a demo mode inside the Forge viewer – Part 1

A request came up in a recent meeting talking about future features for Dasher 360. We want to be able to leave Dasher 360 running in “kiosk mode”, whereby if left unattended for some time it starts to run through some canned activities, showing off some of the tool’s capabilities. The mode should be interruptable: when the mouse moves the mode should stop, allowing the user to continue exploring on their own. This sounded like a really fun problem to tackle, so I started on it right away. My first avenue of research was around tools that already exist... Read more →

Hiding unwanted toolbar items in the Forge viewer

Here’s a quick one to wrap up the week. Some time ago we decided that Dasher 360 didn’t need to provide the option for users to do an unconstrained orbit: the default mode of turntable orbit would be perfectly adequate, especially as we deal mainly with building models. So it was that I created a simple extension to hide that particular toolbar button. It worked well enough, but after a while I saw the icon creep back into the UI. It turns out that the application resize event – which is called for lots of different reasons – was... Read more →

Sessions from Expanding Immersive Design 2016

I had a lot of fun presenting some of my WebVR-related research at the Expanding Immersive Design conference in Zurich, late last year. The recording of my session – where I demoed v1 of Vrok-It – is now online: It was very different conference for me: it was held at ZHdK - the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich’s Fine Arts University – and so was inevitably more focused on design as it relates to VR (as opposed to VR as it relates to design, where I’m more focused ;-). But I think my session helped expand the topic of... Read more →

Flights are booked!

We’ve crossed a pretty big milestone in the plans for my family’s round the world trip for the latter half of 2017: we’ve actually booked flights. Here’s how the latest location tracker looks: You can compare this with the more speculative plan from last time – which still holds good for most areas – to get a sense for the timing and flow. The first image includes prospective destinations reached overland – we’ll be renting cars/RVs/motor-homes in various locations, as well as taking a fair amount of public ground transportation. We’re crossing our fingers that the bus from Salta,... Read more →

Autodesk’s early role in the VR revolution

A few days ago I was reminded of a topic I’ve highlighted in a number of presentations I’ve given over the last few years, but have never actually talked about on this blog. The closest I came was probably in this post. Many people don’t realise Autodesk was an early innovator in the VR space. In the late 80s and early 90s we had a product called the Cyberspace Developer Kit – which allowed you to deliver around four frames per second of glorious, low-polygon 3D via a 386 or 486 PC – that was clearly ahead of its... Read more →