Last week this announcement was made that included a video showing off the sparkling new Autodesk Gallery at our 1 Market Street office in San Francisco.
There’s a lot of inspiring content in the new Gallery – for instance it showcases the results of Autodesk Research’s collaboration with NASA JPL, the generatively designed interplanetary lander, and the scanning robot from Forge partner Scaled Robotics – but I wanted to highlight a project that I’ve participated in quite a bit, over the years, and I’m super-happy to see has a place in the stunning new Gallery: there’s a scale model of Empa’s NEST building with an augmented reality experience. You can see it briefly in the above video at around the 26-second mark.
I haven’t been to San Francisco in oh-so-long – the last time was when I toured the Gallery with my family during our round-the-world tour – but according to the pictures that have kindly been shared with me by the Gallery team the space hasn’t moved from its old location.
Here’s the view along to the reception in the 1 Market St office. I love the physical manifestation of the Autodesk logo.
The Gallery is on the right when you get to the reception desk. If you look closely, you can just see the NEST exhibit to the right of the sign that says “Next breakthroughs”.
Here’s a shot looking back towards the entrance.
The NEST exhibit is a stunning scale model of a building that should be familiar to anyone who has followed my posts on Project Dasher: the NEST building in Zürich, Switzerland.
It’s based on the latest configuration of NEST, with the new HiLo roof.
It looks amazing from any angle.
But on the back it’s cut away, so you can see some of the interior.
The magic happens when you point a tablet (using an app that my friend and Research Engineering colleague Hans Kellner helped develop) at the cutaway section.
You’re presented with data collected by the sensors in the NEST building (the same data we display using Dasher).
Our CEO, Andrew Anagnost, and our former Chief Digital Officer, Jeff Kinder (who has just become the new EVP of our Product Development and Manufacturing Solutions organisation), took a look at the exhibit when they visited the new Gallery space.
Many people have contributed to making this exhibit happen. There’s the team behind the new Gallery – Roddy Wykes, Paula Berggren, Janice Wong-Perez and Leo White – with Phillip Mueller from our AEX (Autodesk Education Experiences) team, who has been a tireless champion of the NEST project, and without whom none of this would have happened. Key external partners on the project have of course come from NEST (especially the Managing Director, Reto Largo) and Matthias Wasem and his team from BIM Facility AG, and Thomas Mueller from Mensch und Maschine Schweiz AG.
Within Autodesk Research there are so many people who have contributed to Dasher, over the years, and so indirectly to the NEST project. I won’t list them all, but shout-out should definitely go to Azam Khan, Alex Tessier, Hali Larsen, Simon Breslav, Josh Cameron, Jacky Bibliowicz and Mike Lee.
I can’t wait to see this exhibit – and the rest of the Gallery! – in person, but that may not be for some time. If any of you do get the chance to see the Gallery in person anytime soon – it should be open for guided tours from next month, March 2022 – please do let me know what you think!
All photos © Autodesk.
