After many months of effort, we now have an updated version of Project Dasher available on dasher360.com. (The project is still very much active research, so for now you’re able to try it out with the model of the NEST building, accessible via the Demo button on the main page.)
The major feature of this update is the new timeline, which was designed by Autodesk Research and developed by our partner CCTech. This component has been under development for over a year, so it’s really exciting to finally get it into people’s hands. Beyond that, you should really give the new visual themes a try: it’s really interesting to see Dasher in dark blue or light gray mode.
Here’s a breakdown of the major changes in this update:
- Forge viewer upgraded from v7.6 to v7.15
- We had to wait for at least v7.14 because of a bug introduced in v7.7 that caused problems when isolating geometry per level
- Upgraded shaders to WebGL 2
- This was required for a number of our custom shaders for Forge viewer v7.10 onwards
- The biggest impact was around migrating Geometry to BufferGeometry for our point cloud-centric shaders
- New timeline
- The new timeline has been designed to be much more resonsive and scalable than the previous version
- It is based on PixiJS rather than vis.js
- Integration of the Autodesk HIG and support for multiple visual themes
- Can be changed via Settings –> Appearance –> Visual Theme
- Looking at themes led to a closer look at UI consistency across dialogs etc.
- Timezone support
- The data can be shown either in UTC, the timezone of the person browsing the data, or the timezone of the facility itself
- The choice is made via config settings that are only accessible to project admins
- The NEST model was previously shown in UTC, but is now set to CET
- Misc bug fixes
- Rendering of sensor map (for hovering) per level was broken
- Kiosk mode now waits for operations to complete fully before continuing
- Sensor filtering was including sensors with no location data
As it’s nearly Easter, you’ll find a fun “Easter Egg” (Dasher’s first!) to allow you to change the theme without using the settings. If you double-click on the “Welcome to Project Dasher” text on the main site, it’ll cycle through the various visual themes. Give it a try now!
We’d love to get your feedback on the changes – especially regarding the new timeline. We’re not completely done with it – despite it being fairly complete, functionally speaking – so it’s a good time for us to get usability feedback. If you give it a try, please do let us know what you think.
