Through the Interface

A taste of things to come with AutoCAD

The AutoCAD team recently released a preview version of a new AutoCAD web viewer. Give it a try using the latest version of Chrome. What’s interesting about this is that it’s very much a taste of things to come – something I alluded to in this recent post. Here are some screenshots: The top three thumbnails link to standard models so that you can quickly take the new viewer for a spin: Here’s the “Plumbing.dwg” drawing loaded in the browser: The text on the left of this page is very interesting, particularly the piece I’ve highlighted below in bold.... Read more →

Introducing the Pier 9 IoT bridge prototype

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a number of guest posts by Autodesk colleagues working on a project that I think will be of interest to many of this blog’s readers. The first post is by Alec Shuldiner, who is introducing the project. At Autodesk, we have a bridge. Recently, we gave that bridge a nervous system: sensors, wires to carry the signal, a small amount of local computing power to pre-sort the data, and, far away, in a virtual head, a brain to make sense of it all. It’s a neat thing, and in a subsequent post... Read more →

The Autodesk University and Forge DevCon 2017 Call for Proposals

The AU2017 call for proposals is now open. The event is being held from November 14-16 in Las Vegas. Being accepted as a presenter is a great way to get exposure within the Autodesk community, as well as being a sure-fire way of attending the conference itself. Something that’s likely to be of interest to this blog’s readers: this year’s Forge DevCon is now sharing the same CFP process as AU2017 (as some of you may be aware, the DevCon has shifted from its original June date in SF to being held on the Monday before AU starts). So... Read more →

Happy birthday, Dasher 360!

One year ago today, on April 20th, 2016, Dasher 360 was born. Here’s the email I sent one year ago to Simon – the other developer working on the project – on creation of the Git repo. For the first day of its life, Dasher 360 didn’t even embed the Forge viewer. :-) Things have come a long way over the last 12 months: Dasher 360 now has a significant number of the features originally found in the desktop version of Dasher, plus a few extra besides. Of course there’s always more to do, but it feels as though... Read more →

A visit to Audemars Piguet

A few weeks ago I received an invitation from an Autodesk customer – Audemars Piguet, a luxury watchmaker based here in Switzerland in the town of Le Brassus – to have a tour of their museum and production facility. So it was that yesterday I headed across to the Vallée de Joux with my friend and colleague, Francesco Tonioni, who works closely with Audemars Piguet. We were welcomed by Denys, who took care of us throughout our day there. Our tour started in the Audemars Piguet museum, where Denys educated us about the rich history of the region and... Read more →

Handling both mouse and touch events in Forge viewer applications

To follow up on the last post – where we talked about adding a custom tool to provide better support for pinch gestures – today we’re going to talk about some other possibilities for supporting touch in the Forge viewer. Once again we’re using Autodesk.Viewing.ToolController & ToolInterface. The Forge viewer uses Hammer.js internally to support touch, so that’s one good place to look for clues on how things work. (Groan – I’ve just realised why it’s called “Hammer”… “you CAN touch this!” :-) I was looking into how to support both “touch-capable” (i.e. they also have mouse & keyboard... Read more →

Fixing pinch-zoom in Forge viewer applications

Over the last few days I’ve been working to improve support for touch devices in Dasher 360: the primary focus is on touch-enabled TVs and monitors, but I’ve been doing much of the testing for this on my mobile phone. Which means things are steadily getting better for people wanting to use phones and tablets to access the site, too. It turns out – and this may not come as a surprise to many of you – that the default pinch behaviour in the Forge viewer is to do an unconstrained orbit. No zoom, just the orbit mode that... Read more →

The AEC Hackathon in Munich

I had the great pleasure of attending the first half (give or take) of the recent AEC Hackathon in Munich. It was held over the first weekend of my kids’ school holidays, so I ended up having to compromise on attending the full event: I flew in on Friday afternoon – with just enough time for some VR fun at our Munich office – and flew back home on Saturday afternoon. So I didn’t get to attend the really fun piece – seeing the results of the weekend’s efforts – but I will talk in this post about what... Read more →

A visit to Autodesk Munich’s VR Center of Excellence

On Friday I had an hour or so to swing by Autodesk’s Munich office and check out the new VR Center of Excellence. I was on my way to the AEC Hackathon at TUM – Munich’s Technical University – which was kicking off during the early evening. As I’ve found from our much more modest VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel, even simpler VR systems can take quite a bit of maintenance, and so Friday in Munich is generally reserved for the team to fix issues that have cropped up during the week. And the Munich room has way more... Read more →

The White House chooses Dasher 360 (Warning: April Fools’ #FakeNews)

Please note the date above: this is an April Fools’ Day post that was deliberately intended to make people only realise late in the article that it is, indeed, #FakeNews. Unfortunately a few (quite possibly automated) news aggregators have passed this on as real. In order to prevent further damage coming from this, I’ve placed this text at the beginning of the post to make the situation super clear. As much as I’d love to have people continue to fall for it – it gives me a fair amount of personal pleasure, I admit – I think it’s safest... Read more →