Some huge news was dropped by the Autodesk Tandem team, last week. Their Facility Monitoring feature is now available to Tandem customers as a Beta release.
This is effectively the culmination of more than a decade of our research into contextualising sensor (IoT) data inside 3D (mainly BIM) environments.
It started through Project Dasher in late 2009, which – passing by our work on Dasher 360 from 2016 – led to the creation of the APS (formerly Forge) viewer’s Data Visualization Extension in 2020-21.
In this latest phase, Dasher has inspired the Tandem team to build out Dasher-like features to bring sensor data into Tandem, effectively completing the journey started with Project Dasher, way back when.
Here’s the full video showing this new feature in action:
The Tandem team used the DataViz extension to implement this feature, of course, so some code from the original Project Dasher lives on inside Tandem… which is nice. But even if this wasn’t the case, the legacy of Dasher – in terms of its influence on both Tandem and the broader industry – is evident.
While I was in Toronto, last week, we took the time to celebrate the event with several members of the original Dasher team (and a few folk from the broader team who helped deliver Generative Design for Revit).
Back to front, left to right: Rhys Goldstein, Pan Zhang, Liviu Calin, Kean Walmsley, Lorenzo Villaggi, Ray Wang, Hali Larsen, Simon Breslav, Alex Tessier, Jacky Bibliowicz, Azam Khan, Mike Lee.
Not everyone involved in Dasher was present: a notable exception from the current Research team being Josh Cameron, who very nearly made it but was foiled by weather-related transport issues, without even mentioning old friends such as Ramtin Attar and Michael Glueck. But it was a pretty decent representation and a whole lot of fun.
The Tandem team has more work to do building out this feature-set – a notable example being the ability to easily dive into and explore historical time periods – but they will do this with input from a growing, engaged customer base. I feel as though we’ve turned a page in terms of our journey with Dasher – from my side the last code I contributed to the front-end was for the 5m Dar Smart Bridge, back at AU 2022 – but the baton is moving quickly onwards down the track, and is in safe hands.
