Through the Interface

Last chance to submit your class proposal for AU 2024!

Tomorrow is April 30th, which brings to a close the Call for Proposals for Autodesk University 2024, which is being held in San Diego from October 15-17. To get you excited, here are a few images taken by one of the official AU photographers. And yes, it’s at least as cool as it looks in the photos, so do make sure you submit your proposal before tomorrow’s deadline. I’ve kindly been included as a co-speaker on one proposal, this year, which - if accepted - will talk about the Extension API to Autodesk Forma. Let’s see if it makes... Read more →

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development Liaison Delegate Meeting 2024 in Montreux

The title of this post is quite the mouthful, but I thought I’d expand out the acronyms for everyone. Last week a colleague asked if I’d like to join an event that was being held quite locally to me, one that Autodesk has participated in for a number of years now. It’s the WBCSD (World Building Council for Sustainable Development) Liaison Delegate Meeting. Basically delegates from the member companies are invited to join a 3-day event to discuss topics related to transforming there businesses to be more sustainable. I couldn’t make the full three days at such late notice,... Read more →

Farewell to Jim Quanci (from Autodesk)

Last night there was a retirement party for my old friend and mentor, Jim Quanci, in the Autodesk Gallery in our 1 Market Street office in downtown San Francisco. Jim has just posted his reflections on his retirement to LinkedIn, so I thought it a good time to chime in with my own thoughts and feelings. I’ve known and worked with Jim for upwards of 25 years. Some of that has been captured in this collage I put together for the kudoboard his colleagues (past and present) put together for his retirement. I genuinely believe that Jim has had... Read more →

April 1st posts through the years

As I was “researching” last week’s April Fools’ Day post, I went back and collected links to all the April 1st posts I’ve put out on this blog, over the years. The first was back in 2008, and the 17th was last week. Here they are (hopefully) for your amusement: Unpublished AutoCAD 2009 APIs to improve application, OS and system performance Through the Interface moving from TypePad to Twitter Child’s Play: a new tool for generating 3D models from children’s drawings AutoCAD for DOS 2012 360 convergence Taking reality capture to the next level: 3D scentsing New pink theme... Read more →

The AU 2024 Call for Proposals is open

It’s that time of year again: the Call for Proposals (CFP) for Autodesk University 2024 opened on April 2nd and will stay open until the end of the month (April 30th, 11:59 PM Pacific Time, to be precise). I’ll be proposing at least one class, all being well, with the hope of getting to travel to San Diego from October 15th-17th for this year’s event. It’d be interesting to see AU in a new city. Fingers crossed! If you’re a software developer who is thinking about submitting a proposal, then I recommend checking out this post on the Autodesk... Read more →

Read about our work on Experiential Views

Our Research team is interested in capturing data about people’s experience of the built environment, as hinted at in the last post (despite the fact it was actually for April 1st, as anyone who read it closely hopefully realized). One aspect of this work has been covered in a recent publication that has been accepted as “late breaking work” at CHI 2024 - the Human-Computer Interaction conference being held next month in Hawai'i. Here’s a brief video that describes the work: The project looked at whether Vision-Language Models (VLMs) could be used to help evaluate designs along human-centric dimensions.... Read more →

Announcing the Autodesk Vision Am

I’m excited to be pre-announcing a new experience capture platform from Autodesk Research: the Autodesk Vision Am. It’s the data capture system we used for our project with The Bentway and showcased at our From Steps to Stories exhibit both in Toronto and at AU 2023 in Las Vegas. The goal is to collect as much data as we can about the human experience of the built environment. You can think of it as a purposefully basic, Amateurish alternative to Apple’s Vision Pro, which we hope you’ll just want to put on first thing in the Am (i.e. the... Read more →