Through the Interface

Realtime visualization of sensor data from the MX3D bridge

We hit a major milestone with our research into smart infrastructure, this week. After a massive push over the last 3-4 weeks (which in itself was built on work done over several years), we were able to deploy a system that measures – and reports in realtime – the performance and usage of the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge. To give you a quick sense of some of the results of this work, here’s an image of Dasher 360 showing the 3D model of the bridge with skeletons walking across it with the bridge’s accelerometer readings displayed as a... Read more →

The MX3D bridge at Dutch Design Week

On Sunday I flex across to Amsterdam, once again, this time to take the train down to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week. Alex Tessier and Michael Lee – colleagues who had barely recovered from the last trip across before coming back to help the project with one last big push – had arrived a few days before me. When we got to the bridge – on oversized cycles borrowed from the hotel but clearly intended for giants – the sky was still a little overcast. Alex and Mike got cracking on fixing some stray sensors and connectors. Our “home”... Read more →

Adding smarts to the MX3D bridge

I’ve spent most of this week in Amsterdam with colleagues from the Toronto office. Our group descended on the MX3D offices in the funky NDSM wharf area of the city, to make a big push and help get the world’s first robotically 3D-printed steel bridge – and its supporting systems – ready for Dutch Design Week. Most of the team stayed in a hotel right next to MX3D, but we did get the chance to take the ferry across to “the mainland” (it isn’t really: everything is connected, it just seems that way) from time to time. It was... Read more →

Rob|Arch 2018

I spent the latter half of last week at ETH Zurich, attending a conference entitled “Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design 2018”, or Rob|Arch 2018 for short. This is the biennial conference where luminaries in the AEC industry get together and plot how robots will replace millions of construction jobs over the years to come. Not really, of course: the big thrust of this conference is to work out how robotic fabrication technology might (or must) be applied to meet the housing needs of a planet whose population is expected to increase by nearly 30% over the coming... Read more →

Checking out the world’s first 3D printed steel bridge at MX3D in Amsterdam

In a recent post I mentioned a trip to Amsterdam to visit with Van Wijnen and MX3D. The press embargo has now lifted on MX3D’s bridge – as you can see from a slew of recent articles – so I can now share a bit more information about that part of the visit. During that week I spent 2.5 days at MX3D, mostly to participate in discussions about how best to instrument the bridge with sensors. Autodesk started our collaboration with MX3D around the vision of using generative design for the creation of the bridge’s form… during the last... Read more →

Hackrod is open to the crowd

I was really excited to hear, over the weekend, that our friends at Hackrod have launched a successful crowd-funding campaign and that there’s still time to participate. The campaign is being hosted on MicroVentures, which means investors should receive interest on their investment as well as equity in the project, assuming things work out. This admittedly seems a nicer model than getting a T-shirt or coffee mug saying you supported their Kickstarter. ;-) I haven’t yet decided whether I’m personally going to get in on the action (so to speak) but I thought I’d post about it in case... Read more →

TEDx Portand talk on generative design and human augmentation

Following up from last week’s post, which included a brief video showing where we’re headed with generative design, today’s post highlights a speech by my colleague in Autodesk’s Office of the CTO (OCTO), Maurice Conti. I’ve mentioned Maurice before: he has an Applied Research team working on Pier 9 that is currently hiring a Machine Learning + Robotics researcher. Maurice gave a speech at TEDx Portland entitled “The Future of Human Augmentation”. It looks at how we’re being augmented, not only by computational systems (helping us think) but by robotic systems (helping us make) and by a digital nervous... Read more →

Autodesk’s Project Escher

I first heard about Project Escher a few months ago and found the idea really interesting: coordinating multiple print heads to introduce parallelism into additive manufacturing. Then, last week, there was a really interesting Q&A about the project in an Autodesk-internal newsletter. I’m reprinting it here, below, as I know it will be of interest to this blog’s readers. When it came to looking for an image for this post, I decided to look for something by M. C. Escher that was in some way descriptive or representative. An obvious choice was his “Drawing Hands” lithograph, although it’s probably... Read more →

My Swiss Tech Talk at Autodesk

Yesterday I had the honour of presenting a Swiss Tech Talk in Autodesk’s Neuchatel office. I’ve attended a number of these events over the last year or so – on such diverse topics as Bluetooth, IP issues related to the cloud and IoT, and the changing face of management consulting – so it was a great pleasure to be invited by the Swiss Tech Association to deliver a session on behalf of Autodesk. I figured the audience wouldn’t be interested in hearing about AutoCAD APIs – sure, I find this fascinating, but different strokes and all that – so... Read more →

Autodesk and Airbus generatively design a 3D-printed “bionic” partition for the A320

One of the coolest news items to break during AU 2015 was the collaboration between Autodesk and Airbus to design and 3D print a groundbreaking new partition for the A320. Partitions are certainly not the sexiest part of a plane (not that I have a particular opinion on what that might be… the undercarriage, perhaps? :-) but even they can have a significant impact on its performance and therefore the environment. Each A320 currently sports a 65kg partition at the back – separating the passenger compartment from the galley – that supports two crew seats and can be opened... Read more →

The first 3D print from our Ember

My friend and colleague, Fernando Oliveira, had the honour of printing the first object from the Ember printer we have in the Autodesk Neuchâtel office. To capture the moment, I decided to take a few snaps that I’ll share here. The design work was all done in Fusion 360. The design is a logo comprising of Fernando’s daughter’s initials. The printing process was managed by Print Studio, part of the Spark platform. I included the below shot – despite it being out of focus and not especially flattering – because it gives a view from our corner lab across... Read more →

Updates to Autodesk ReCap and Memento

Some serious updates to our reality computing tools have been released in the last few days… here’s a quick round-up with links you can use to go and find out more. ReCap 2.2 Each member of the ReCap portfolio – ReCap, ReCap 360 and ReCap Ultimate – has significant new features in this release. Full details are available here. To summarize just a few, there are new features focused on noise clean-up of point clouds as well as optimizing them for editing performance and project size, and a number of improvements relating to creation of presentation assets such as... Read more →

Le Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris

My best attempt to describe this technical, industrial museum is as a Mecca for Makers. It’s not a funky new space with a bunch of hipsters manning 3D printers – not that I have a problem with such spaces… I love those spaces :-) – rather it’s a shrine to all manner of human invention and creation since before the industrial revolution. The first thing I had to see on entering the museum, this morning, was Foucault’s Pendulum – with the museum playing a key part in Umberto Eco’s incredible novel of the same name, this was a “must... Read more →

Autodesk Memento now in public beta

One of the announcements at the recent REAL 2015 conference – and if you missed the event, as I did, you can see a great summary here – was the fact that the much-appreciated mesh manipulation tool from our Reality Solutions division, Autodesk Memento, has now entered public beta. It has graduated from Autodesk Labs and is now available for download without you having to log into the beta portal. It also has a brand new web-site describing why you might want to use it. For those of you who have been tracking its progress, release on release, here... Read more →

REAL 2015 in San Francisco from February 25-27

There’s a really interesting conference in San Francisco, later this month (groan). It’s being held in Fort Mason on February 25-27, and covers all aspects of reality computing, whether relating to capture, compute or create: Autodesk is the main organizer of the event, but there are lots of other companies and institutions involved, too. Check out the list of speakers: there are executives and specialists from Autodesk lined up as well as several eminent names from the industry. Here's a quick video giving a sense of what the conference is all about: And in case you’re still interested in... Read more →

Autodesk University 2014: Day 3

Autodesk University 2014 ended really well on Thursday. Despite me nearly showing up late for my final speaking engagement (I somehow had it in my head that it started at 1:30pm rather than 1:00pm – thankfully I chose to show up 32 minutes early!), the session itself went very well. It was the only one of my sessions that ended up being recorded (it wasn’t about AutoCAD, at all – it was all about the Geneva Motor Show project which was implemented using Autodesk VRED), and it was a fun one. The final keynote was, once again, very inspiring.... Read more →

Autodesk University 2014: Day 2

It’s suddenly Thursday morning. I feel like I’ve been in one of those hyperlapse videos since my last blog post. Here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to. When I wrote my last post I was actually sitting in on Albert Szilvasy’s AutoCAD I/O session. This very interesting class was recorded so be sure to watch it when it comes online. From there I headed to the Exhibit Hall. This year the Exhibit Hall at AU is just incredible. I don’t know what’s changed, exactly, but I just love the way it’s been laid out. And I’ve... Read more →

Update on Spark, Autodesk’s 3D printing platform

There’s been a lot in the news about Spark – Autodesk’s entry into the 3D printing market – of late. Earlier in the year we announced this open platform and a reference design for it, but in the last few weeks things have become even more interesting: specific examples of partnerships with companies who are building their own printers based on Spark have started to emerge. I thought it worth aggregating a few of the more interesting articles for those who might have missed them. I’m personally really interested in the approach Autodesk is taking here. It seems to... Read more →

Quite the road trip: 3DRV

Some of you are probably aware of this activity from Shaan’s and Scott’s blogs, but I thought it was overdue a mention here, too. Autodesk is sponsoring the mother of all road trips: over the course of 8 months, TJ McCue is travelling the length and breadth of the United States in a brightly decorated recreational vehicle (RV), spreading the word about 3D technology. TJ is talking to people around the country about reality computing – capture, processing and fabrication processes such as 3D printing – as well as the availability of low-cost design tools. TJ is documenting his... Read more →

3 things I learned at last week’s Technical Summit

The Autodesk Technical Summit is an annual, internal, 2-day technical conference for members of Autodesk’s engineering staff. I’ve been lucky enough to attend since 2011 (the first was held in 2010), and have seen the event grow both in breadth and attendance, over the years: this year there were 500 attendees from around the world and some really excellent presentations. Most years I’ve been at the event as a presenter (I talked about F# in 2011, Kinect in 2012 and then both Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion in 2013): this is the first time I was there purely as... Read more →