Through the Interface

More on Tandem and Dasher

This week we’ve updated the Project Dasher site with a new build – the first update we’ve made in nearly a year. (I’ve talked about some of the rewrite work in a previous post, but it’s taken a while to get around to making it all available.) One of the major improvements has been with the timeline component. At some point in the future I’ll spend some time talking more about the timeline’s features – it’s available publicly via NPM and is integrated into the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization extension reference application – but for now I just wanted... Read more →

Happy 40th birthday, Speccy!

On Saturday the ZX Spectrum turned 40. Does that make anyone else feel old? When first released on April 23rd, 1982, Sinclair Research’s ZX Spectrum had 16K of RAM, a horrible rubber keyboard and some very quirky colour graphics. In fairness, though, it was a quantum leap (another Sinclair reference for the astute observer) beyond the ZX81, which had – unexpanded – just 1K of RAM, a truly grotesque membrane keyboard and low-res black and white graphics. Both of these devices changed the world: the Spectrum went on to become the UK’s best-selling microcomputer, launching an industry and many,... Read more →

Harnessing the Tandem SDK inside Dasher

Back in September we started the work to integrate the (currently still internal) SDK for Autodesk Tandem into Project Dasher. This is what I’ve referred to, in the past, as “Tandem inside Dasher” (as opposed to “Dasher inside Tandem”). The work hasn’t been happening constantly: it’s been intermittent, as changes were needed to both Tandem and the core Forge viewer to support certain workflows. I’m happy to say that, as of this week, the integration is pretty close to having parity with the version based on the traditional Forge viewer, with a few gaps that should be filled in... Read more →

Back from the long Easter weekend

In Europe many of us have been enjoying a four-day weekend for Easter. As my birthday this year fell on Maundy Thursday, I decided to extend it to five (fantastic) days. We’d previously planned to meet up with some old friends from Singapore who are visiting Italy, but we a) wanted to stay around to support our eldest son who’s busy revising for his baccalauréat exams and b) didn’t want to have to worry about Covid-related restrictions that are still in place in Italy. So we ended up staying in Switzerland. During the day of my birthday itself, we... Read more →

Three AU proposals to vote for and a deadline reminder

It’s the last few days to submit your class proposals for Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans. The Call for Proposals closes on April 15th. I’ve now submitted three classes, myself, and would greatly appreciate you voting for the one(s) you would like to see part of the event. This is whether you intend on being there in-person in New Orleans or not: the vast majority of classes will either be livestreamed or recorded and made available on-demand for virtual attendees. Here they are. Voting is open until April 25th. Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Building Digital Twins... Read more →

Forge Data Days coming to a city near you

Now that I’ve recovered from this week’s trip to Paris – and from both the pleasure and the shock of seeing people physically in meatspace – it’s time to look ahead to another trip. The Developer Advocacy and Support team have announced a new worldwide event tour where they’ll be talking to people about the upcoming Forge Data platform. Here are the dates that were confirmed at the time of writing this post: Europe May 31st | Munich, Germany June 2nd | Gothenburg, Sweden June 7th | Birmingham, UK June 9th | Milan, Italy June 14th | Barcelona, Spain... Read more →

BIM World Paris 2022

On Monday I hopped onto the train to Geneva and from there onto the TGV to Paris Gare de Lyon. I was in Paris for BIM World, where we displayed the Dar 2m Smart Bridge. It was my first time seeing the bridge in person, which was a really exciting moment for me. After checking into a very nice little hotel in the 6th arrondissement I headed to the conference centre to help with the setup. The bridge was already unboxed and hooked up when I arrived. Pete Storey had some wires to connect to get it up and... Read more →

Announcing VASA for Minecraft

Followers of this blog will have seen me mention the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package (you can find all the posts about it here). VASA is a toolkit that allows you to voxelise and analyse 3D geometry, whether for pathfinding, visibility or daylight analysis. The big news of the day is that Autodesk Research has managed to port VASA across to work with the popular voxel-based creation environment, Minecraft. This actually was pretty easy, as we could completely ignore all the code needed to voxelise a 3D environment from the codebase and focus on the analysis side of... Read more →