Through the Interface

An update on my AU2018 classes

There’s just over a week to go before the craziest week of my year (i.e. Autodesk University) kicks off, once again. I’ve been heads-down preparing various slide-decks and handouts for the big event. Things are in reasonably good shape, but there’s still a bit of work left to do. I had a quick glance at the class list – mainly to make sure that I had the classes themselves in my calendar, before people start double-booking me for meetings – and I noticed the numbers of registrations: Here’s a list to the various classes with links so you can... Read more →

Realtime visualization of sensor data from the MX3D bridge

We hit a major milestone with our research into smart infrastructure, this week. After a massive push over the last 3-4 weeks (which in itself was built on work done over several years), we were able to deploy a system that measures – and reports in realtime – the performance and usage of the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge. To give you a quick sense of some of the results of this work, here’s an image of Dasher 360 showing the 3D model of the bridge with skeletons walking across it with the bridge’s accelerometer readings displayed as a... Read more →

The MX3D bridge at Dutch Design Week

On Sunday I flex across to Amsterdam, once again, this time to take the train down to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week. Alex Tessier and Michael Lee – colleagues who had barely recovered from the last trip across before coming back to help the project with one last big push – had arrived a few days before me. When we got to the bridge – on oversized cycles borrowed from the hotel but clearly intended for giants – the sky was still a little overcast. Alex and Mike got cracking on fixing some stray sensors and connectors. Our “home”... Read more →

Digital robot twins

This week I spent quite a bit of time talking to people about digital twins that include skeletons and robots. For skeletons I’ve been working off real data from static JSON files – not yet time-series database-resident – but for robots I’ve just been relying on simulated movements. Until today, that is. Josh Cameron, an Autodesk Research colleague in Toronto, sent through a video he took of a robot while streaming its data to our time-series back-end. This helped me interpret the data (reasonably) correctly, at least for a first pass. You’ll notice the virtal robot is a different... Read more →

Forge DevCon Europe

It’s been a whirlwind few days. The trip up to Darmstadt on Monday went relatively smoothly: I had to take four trains to get there, and only missed one connection (the one in Frankfurt, but thankfully I could hop on another train and arrive just 10 minutes later than planned). Still, the nearly 6 hours of train passed reasonably smoothly. After arriving in Darmstadt I met with Sander Lijbers and Tony Thuy, who’d organised to host some customers from the Netherlands. We went for dinner at a nice restaurant serving local food. When in Germany, eat schnitzel! It was... Read more →

Coming to a Forge DevCon in the US or Europe? It turns out I’ll be talking at both!

Well, this just happened: after having had three generative design-related classes accepted for AU 2018 (well, really two were accepted and one ended up getting a repeat slot at the Connect & Construct pre-conference), I wasn’t due to talk about anything I’ve been doing lately with the Forge viewer. Which frankly was a shame, because between robots, skeletons and streamlines, as feel as though I’ve got lots of fun stuff to share, at the moment. That was until yesterday, when I got pinged by Stephen Preston (for the US DevCon) and Cyrille Fauvel (for the European one), to ask... Read more →

Generative Design Day in Barcelona

After a crazy (but cool) few days in Amsterdam at the beginning of last week, on Thursday night I hopped across to Barcelona for an event being organised by our Enterprise Priority support team. They had invited our larger customers from all over Europe to come and hear about the use of generative design technologies in the AEC space, both present and future. I woke up early in the hotel opposite Autodesk’s nearly-beachfront office to see the morning light hitting it. The event itself was on the first floor of the office, so we were surrounded by autumn colours.... Read more →

Adding smarts to the MX3D bridge

I’ve spent most of this week in Amsterdam with colleagues from the Toronto office. Our group descended on the MX3D offices in the funky NDSM wharf area of the city, to make a big push and help get the world’s first robotically 3D-printed steel bridge – and its supporting systems – ready for Dutch Design Week. Most of the team stayed in a hotel right next to MX3D, but we did get the chance to take the ferry across to “the mainland” (it isn’t really: everything is connected, it just seems that way) from time to time. It was... Read more →

About Bristlebots

My world seems to be filled with robots, these days, whether seeing how they can be used in architecture and construction, animating them inside Forge, or seeing them 3D print steel bridges (I’m at MX3D again, this week). It makes me think I should probably dust off my HoloLens app for making robots dance in mixed reality: once we’re using data inside the Forge viewer-powered Dasher 360 to show the position of a robot at a particular moment in time, it’s hardly a huge leap to show that in XR. Anyway, I should get to the point… Given this... Read more →