Through the Interface

Death of the Metaverse. Come work on XR at Autodesk!

You don’t have to look far, these days, to find dire prognostications about the death of the Metaverse. That’s the nature of the hype cycle: those without the patience to help push technology through the Trough of Disillusionment move on to other things. Although the speed with which the Metaverse passed the Peak of Inflated Expectations in 2022 is impressive. Interestingly the Gartner Hype Cycle for 2016 reported Virtual Reality as having emerged onto the Slope of Enlightenment, but even at this time I felt this was premature. These models do have to be seen as what they are:... Read more →

AI+X Summit 2022

On Friday I hopped on a train to Zurich to attend the AI+X Summit 2022 event – organised by the ETH AI Center – which was co-located with the ETH Entrepreneur Club’s Launch event. It was a lovely autumn day, and the colours were even on display in Zurich’s Oerlikon district. The event was held at Stage One, an event space a short walk from the Oerlikon train station. I was mainly there for the AI+AEC workshop, but there were a number of mainstage presentations and exhibits by startups and larger companies involved in AI. The workshops were held... Read more →

Become a resident at an Autodesk Technology Center and get access to a HoloLens 2

Our Technology Centers team has posted an interesting RFP on LinkedIn: they’ve been working with Microsoft to make HoloLens 2 headsets available to Technology Center residents interested in exploring mixed reality workflows for the AEC and Manufacturing industries. It seems pretty straightforward: if you’re interested in developing a mixed reality solution – whether using Unity, Unreal or WebXR – then you need to submit your proposal before August 24th, 2020. If accepted you’ll be invited into our residency program and provided a HoloLens 2 device for 6 months (with the possibility of extending the term, if needed). This seems... Read more →

Virtual Forge Accelerators – coming to an office (very) near you

For two of the last three weeks I’ve been lurking in virtual Forge Accelerators: as I mentioned last time, the Forge team has pivoted to virtual events after this year’s Accelerator in Sydney was forced online due to a COVID-related office closure. (Incidentally I need to get used to the team’s new name: they recently switched from Forge Partner Development to Developer Advocacy and Support. FPD is no more, the future is DAS!) The DAS team has since gone “all in” on these events, holding two during the month of April. The first one was codenamed Metropolis and ran... Read more →

Connecting Refinery to VR

It’s time to talk about a little project I started over the holiday break: connecting Project Refinery – the optimization engine for Dynamo that will help drive Generative Design workflows – to Virtual Reality. It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for some time, now, and was originally inspired by two things: the workflow Van Wijnen uses Refinery for makes heavy use of VR for visualization – to evaluate designs with internal stakeholders – but right now they export the geometry from Dynamo to Revit and then use Enscape to visualize the scenes. It’s not a complicated process, but... Read more →

Welcome to 2019, the year of Generative Design

Happy New Year! I’ve just come back online after a wonderful (and much-needed) 2-week break. I hope those of you who were lucky enough to get time off at this time of year made the most of it and managed to spend some quality time with your loved ones. (I will admit that since the beginning of this year I’ve been spending a little time working on a really fun side project, so I can’t say I’ve disconnected completely… but more on this later. :-) As I don’t really have an image to accompany this post, here’s a quick... Read more →

A visit to Basler & Hofmann

Yesterday I headed across to Esslingen, a town south-east from Zurich, to meet with a large Swiss customer of ours, Basler & Hofmann. They’re an independent engineering, planning and consulting company with 600 employees in 4 countries (although most are based here in Switzerland). One of the reasons for meeting in Esslingen was the chance to visit the site of their Office Building Extension eGHA project – the winner of an AEC Excellence Award that was presented at Autodesk University 2018. Our hosts were Mathias Kuhn and Gianluca Genova, who had been in Las Vegas to receive their award,... 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 →

Don’t miss these sessions at the Forge DevCon in Las Vegas

The Forge DevCon is a great place to dive deeply into what’s possible – and what will soon be possible – with the Forge platform. I’m involved in the organisation of the Las Vegas DevCon – being held on November 12-13, 2018 – in that I help lead one of the tracks. When the first DevCon took place, back in 2016, I was track-lead for the AR/VR track… these days I’m co-track-lead with my old friend Cyrille Fauvel for the Complementary Technologies track, which incorporates topics such as AR/VR, AI and robotics. All the really fun stuff, basically. ;-)... Read more →

Registration is now open for Autodesk University, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct 2018

Last Thursday registration opened for the latest edition of Autodesk University and its pre-conference events, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct. I’ve just gone ahead and registered: I’ll arrive in Las Vegas on Saturday November 10th (to give myself a fighting chance of handling my jetlag before things kick off properly on Monday the 12th) and head home on the Thursday evening. My classes, this year, fall during the pre-conference and the first day of AU proper, which is nice, especially as it means you won’t need a full AU pass to attend (you can find pricing of Monday... Read more →

AEC Hackathon Berlin 2018

I’ve just arrived back from Berlin, which I was primarily visiting for this year’s German AEC Hackathon (last year’s was in Munich, which I attended briefly in the weeks leading up to our big trip). I was there with my family, and we had a great time visiting the city when I wasn’t needed at the Hackathon. Let’s start with a few tourist shots. On Thursday we visited a few places, such as the Holocaust Memorial… … and the Berlin Cathedral, which was beautiful inside but had stunning views across the city from its roof. We were staying with... Read more →

Leap Motion’s Mirrorworlds concept

I haven’t been spending much time, of late, on XR (the convenient abbreviation for AR/VR/MR), but this blog post got my attention. Our friends at Leap Motion – the company who created interesting technology for capturing hand gestures and who has, over the last few years, executed a fairly successful pivot to focus on XR – have put together an interesting concept that does a good job of making XR compelling for various scenarios. Warning: be careful not to confuse Leap Motion with the once-future-of-mixed-reality-but-now-looking-increasingly-overhyped Magic Leap… 3+ years ago Magic Leap was hot news with their cool promotional... Read more →

Just a few weeks until the AEC Hackathon in Berlin

On July 20-22, 2018 I’ll be attending the AEC Hackathon in Berlin. Here’s some information about the event: The AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) Hackathon is a weekend of geeking at its finest. It gives those designing, building and maintaining our built environment, the opportunity to engage, collaborate and interact on multiple aspects of the building industry. Not all built environment professionals have to code or have much background with tech. Just come with your knowledge, an open mind, collaborative spirit, and willingness to solve Mon-Fri problems leveraging various kinds of technology. We’ve shaped an exhilarating Program on Robotics,... Read more →

A summary of news from Forge DevCon 2017

For those of you who – like me – weren’t able to travel to Las Vegas for this year’s Forge DevCon, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of the major news that I could extract over the wire. I’m sure there will be further blog posts from the Forge team summarising more of things I couldn’t see – not being there in person – but this will hopefully be of some use to people, at least. To kick things off, I suggest reading this blog post. It talks about some high-level items, such as additions to the platform,... Read more →

Picton to Christchurch

As much as I hate compressing so much into a single post, I don’t see any other option if I’m to bring you all up-to-date. So please accept my apologies for not doing justice to New Zealand’s absolutely incredible south island. In this post we’ll talk about the first part of the journey through the south island, from Picton to Christchurch. I’ll cover the journey from Christchurch to Queenstown in the next post. Here’s a quick view of our journey southwards, for context. Our adventure on the south island started the Saturday before last. We took the 2.45pm Interislander... Read more →

Autodesk is seeking a Senior Evangelist for AR/VR

There’s a very interesting job posting that I wanted to highlight for readers of this blog: Autodesk’s Immersive Experiences Group (IXG) is seeking a Senior Evangelist for Augmented and Virtual Reality. IXG is a fairly recently named group at Autodesk: I’m curious about the choice of the term Immersive, as my understanding is that the organisation’s mandate is very much also about Augmented and Mixed Reality, which for me is more contextual than immersive. But frankly that’s a minor detail: IXG does have a nice ring to it, and we do love our TLAs at Autodesk. Here’s an excerpt... Read more →

3D & Mixed Reality at Microsoft House

OK, so that was perhaps a little mad. Earlier today I spent 5 hours on the train – going from Neuchatel to Zurich and then on the new SBB service via the Gotthard Base Tunnel – to get to Milan, had a coffee with my uncle (who lives and works nearby), gave a 30-minute presentation on Forge and AR/VR at a Meetup, and then spent 4.5 hours on more trains – this time going towards Geneva on the EuroCity (formerly Cisalpino), and then changing at Brig to head via Bern – to get home. This was the main train... Read more →

Coming to Milan for a Mixed Reality Meetup

On Tuesday, I’ll be travelling to Milan and back (on the same day, by train) to present at a “3D / Mixed Reality” Meetup hosted at the beautiful new Microsoft House, headquarters of Microsoft Italia. I’ll be talking about Forge and AR/VR, and I’ll no doubt include a Dancing Robot or two, I expect. It’s pretty cool to be visiting Microsoft House: it was designed by Swiss architect Herzog & De Meuron (a good customer of Autodesk’s who I visited earlier this year in Basel) and it looks absolutely stunning. Many thanks to Giorgio Mazzucchelli for extending the invitation... Read more →

AEC Hackathon is coming to Munich (and so am I)

I’ve been interested in participating in – or at least attending – an AEC Hackathon for a couple of years now. I was first introduced to them during the VR Hackathons I attended in SF in 2014 and 2015 (Damon, Greg and Paul, who help organize the AEC Hackathons, were also organizing/involved in/attending the VR ones). There are a number of AEC Hackathons planned for Europe over the coming months, so I’m happy to say I’ll finally get my chance. I’ve been asked to present at the first – which is in Munich from March 31st – April 2nd... Read more →

Autodesk’s early role in the VR revolution

A few days ago I was reminded of a topic I’ve highlighted in a number of presentations I’ve given over the last few years, but have never actually talked about on this blog. The closest I came was probably in this post. Many people don’t realise Autodesk was an early innovator in the VR space. In the late 80s and early 90s we had a product called the Cyberspace Developer Kit – which allowed you to deliver around four frames per second of glorious, low-polygon 3D via a 386 or 486 PC – that was clearly ahead of its... Read more →