Through the Interface

The Digital World: BIM

Tomorrow (or today for some of you) marks the start of a 3-day event – the Built Environment Summit – being run by BSI in the UK. Here’s the agenda for Day 1 (December 1st 2020, all times UTC/GMT): 09:00 - 09:10 Chairman's Opening Remarks 09:10 - 10:30 DFMA and IoT: What are the possibilities? 10:30 - 10:50 Morning Break 10:50 - 12:00 Build-by-wire: the future 12:00 - 13:00 Asset Performance Management: Who benefits? What could we expect? 13:00 - 13:30 Lunch Break [13:30 - 15:45 Product Data and Standardization] 13:30 - 13:50 Construction Innovation Hub and LEXiCON 13:50... Read more →

Floppy Friday #5

During the last few days I went through and found a couple more floppies for this week’s Floppy Friday. The first contained Rastan, a game where you’re a barbarian warrior off on some kind of adventure. The second contained a game called Druid (although the loader referred to it as “Druids”, for some reason), which was heavily inspired by one of my arcade favourites, Gauntlet. Anyway, here’s today’s episode. Enjoy! I mentioned a couple of things in this episode: this week I managed to find a new joystick (in fact three of them!) which should arrive shortly. I also... Read more →

Build Your Own Dasher during the upcoming Forge Accelerator

Forge Accelerators have always been BYOD. First they were “Bring Your Own Device”, then (on going virtual) they were also “Bring Your Own Drinks” and now for the upcoming event – on December 7-11 2020 – we’re giving people the opportunity to “Build Your Own Dasher”. BYOD3! Attendees at the Candy Cane accelerator (love those codenames) will get early access to to the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension – and the source code for the reference application that shows how to use it – which will greatly simplify the process of building a Digital Twin using Forge. (Something that... Read more →

Winding down after AU 2020

Much in the same way as I felt a little tired last Monday – something I suggested on Twitter might be Pavlovian, as it wasn’t due to jetlag or travel-based fatigue – today has been another low energy day. (Typically the week after AU – and sometimes even longer – is a non-event for me, but this year there’s no good reason for it to be. I expect I’ll be back on top of things tomorrow.) Anyway, it is a good opportunity to reflect back on last week’s “first of its kind” (and many of us are hoping “one... Read more →

Floppy Friday #4

I wasn’t sure I’d find the time to record this week’s episode – what with Autodesk University 2020 being in full swing – but I also thought it might be a nice way to wind down after a hectic week. I hope all of you who attended this year’s AU found it useful (and even fun!) despite the constraints imposed by it being fully online. I’ll post something about how I personally think it went on Monday. Anyway, this week’s Floppy Friday starts with a Star Trek graphic and theme tune, and then looks at a number of games... Read more →

My AU 2020 class Q&A

Yesterday evening was the Q&A for my Autodesk University 2020 class, Lessons from Project Dasher: Building a Digital Twin Using Forge. People registered for AU you can use the above link to access the recording for the next 30 days. Just click on the Join Now button: I really wasn’t sure what to expect from this session – having a full hour dedicated to questions! – but I think it went OK. There were a few speedbumps: the assigned moderator for my class was busy elsewhere and so only arrived partway through. It’s AU week, so I understood, and... Read more →

Autodesk Tandem and the Forge Viewer Data Visualization Extension

Yesterday was a great day for people interested in Digital Twins (among lots of other topics, of course). During the AU 2020 General Session and the AEC Keynote we heard about Autodesk Tandem, a new product and platform for creating Digital Twins from BIM. During the Forge Keynote, we heard about the Forge viewer’s new Data Visualization Extension, which simplifies the mapping of (for instance) sensor data into the viewer. I’ve had lots of questions already about how these announcements relate to Project Dasher and the work we’ve been doing in Autodesk Research. Some of these are covered in... Read more →

Fancy a chat during AU 2020?

And so it begins: today is the first day of Autodesk University 2020 (at least in the US), to be enjoyed (most probably) from the comfort of your home office or living room. We are now at well over 100,000 registrations, which is simply unbelievable. Many on Twitter are lamenting (or more likely relishing) the fact they’re not travelling to Las Vegas, dealing with jetlag, dehydration, cracked lips (viva los chapstick), lack of daylight (not good when dealing with the aforementioned jetlag), passive smoke inhalation, slot machine noise pollution and, yes, alcohol poisoning. I do miss the in-person contact... Read more →

Participate in Research at AU 2020

At our in-person Autodesk University events, it’s common for our R&D teams to interview customers and to brief them on ongoing research projects and upcoming product features. This is a really valuable part of our R&D process: this feedback helps us make sure that our products and services help the industry move forward by addressing real customer pain. This year is a bit different, of course: rather than hanging around the Idea Exchange – which I know many of us struggle to find time for – you can sign up for sessions via the AU website (or the links... Read more →

Floppy Friday #3

It’s Friday, so it’s time to dig into a few old floppies for my old new Commodore 64. In this week’s episode we take a look at an image on the same floppy as Bubble Bobble – which we saw last week – and then play Artax (and no, this doesn’t have anything to do with Atreyu’s horse from The NeverEnding Story), Rick Dangerous and Zaxxon. It’s Autodesk University next week, so I hope I’ll still find time to record one of these to be posted on Friday, but we’ll see. Once again, if you enjoy this content, please... Read more →

Build your AU 2020 schedule today

It’s time: the full, interactive schedule for this year’s all-digital Autodesk University is now online. You can go ahead and start bookmarking your favourite classes today. Assuming you’re one of the 85,000 (and counting!) people who have registered for the event. If you haven’t already registered, don’t worry: you can still do so for free. (There are still plenty of tickets left. ;-) So to get things rolling, here’s a link to my AU 2020 class for you to bookmark and watch from November 17th. You can expect some interesting news to be announced (or at least repeated) in... Read more →

Kicking off the pre-AU Forge Hackathon

‘Twas the week before AU, when all around the globe, developers began coding, into Forge did they probe. Unknown Before Autodesk University kicks off, next week, our Developer Advocacy and Support team is running the inaugural Forge Hackathon. I talked about this event a month ago: hopefully some of you saw that and decided to sign up. By all accounts it’s well subscribed, either way: I see 45 team channels in Slack, and people have started talking about their various hacks. We started today with an introduction for Asia and Europe. Cyrille Fauvel kicked things off and introduced –... Read more →

Floppy Friday #2

With all the stress and anxiety in the world at the moment, it’s nice to unwind with an old school video game. In this week’s Floppy Friday we take a quick look at a couple of games – Nibbly ‘92 and Bubble Bobble. I used to play Bubble Bobble back in the day on my ZX Spectrum, but whatever skillz I may have once had have totally disappeared, as you’ll see. If you want to check out the previous episode, here it is. I’ve also created a playlist, in case you want to use you want to use it... Read more →

Halloween and 3D skeletons

This year’s Halloween was destined to disappoint: we’d held out some hope until the 30th that the kids (which just means our youngest, at this point) would end up being able to go trick-or-treating in our village. Understandably – but disappointingly – the announcement came that any kind of trick-or-treating was off the cards for this Halloween. Stricter rules about groups of people were also announced, but with effect from today. From today onwards any kind of public or private event can have a maximum of 5 people present. Given the acceleration of cases in Switzerland, this is completely... Read more →