Through the Interface

Smarter Bridges Conference 2022

On Sunday I flew back across from Zurich to Schipol for a small, 2-day conference attended by various stakeholders in the MX3D smartbridge project. Very confusingly there were two flights leaving for Amsterdam at exactly the same time – 17h35 – so I very nearly ended up at the wrong gate. Luckily I realised in time. On arriving at Schipol I took the train to Amsterdam Centraal, where I saw an overnight train back to Switzerland was about to leave. (I had tried hard to find a space on this train to come across for the conference, but it... Read more →

TechX 2022 in Atlanta

On Monday I flew from Geneva to Paris and then changed flights to head across to Atlanta for TechX 2022. TechX is Autodesk’s annual internal technology geekfest. This year’s TechX – the first in-person event since 2019’s in New Orleans – has been held in the Atlanta Hilton. I have a room that’s on a high floor, and as I’m waking up with jetlag for the first time in nearly 3 years, I managed to see the view across the city as the sun came up. The mornings have kicked off with keynote sessions. Andrew Anagnost, our CEO, showed... Read more →

Working around the Chrome bug affecting the timeline

The amazing Mike Lee – who has been doing a great job of driving the timeline project for Dasher – has used his sleuthing skills to figure out a way around the bug affecting Intel-based Macs running Chrome v100 on Monterey. He was about to submit a bug when he discovered this ticket filed against Chromium, and a workaround buried within in. (Mike has since gone ahead and submitted his own report tracking this.) You need to go to chrome://flags and disable “Use passthrough command decoder”. After restarting Chrome and launching Dasher, you should now see the timeline is... Read more →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Detecting collisions in the Forge viewer

In a recent post we saw that switching to use THREE.BufferGeometry brought some unexpected benefits when it came to rendering robots inside Dasher. I wasn’t very happy about the fact that said robots were spinning destructively on the MX3D bridge, so I started looking into options for collision detection inside a Forge viewer application. From the start I should say that the approach that I ended up choosing is fairly rudimentary in nature: a much better solution would be to integrate a physics engine such as Ammo.js or perhaps even a voxelization engine such as VASA. But I figured... Read more →

BIM World Paris is next week

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ll be in Paris next week for BIM World on April 5th and 6th, 2022. The 2m Dar Smart Bridge has apparently arrived in Paris from Dubai, so once a few legal formalities have been completed it should be on-site at the event. I’m looking forward to seeing how it looks – and performs – in person, especially when connected to Dasher! Autodesk will have a fairly significant presence at BIM World, by all accounts. I’ve done my best to pull together the various activities (beyond whatever’s happening at the booths on... Read more →

Switching to use THREE.BufferGeometry in Forge viewer applications

I talked some time ago about some work that has been needed to be done in Project Dasher – and other Forge viewer clients – in anticipation of supporting viewers such as Tandem’s. In this case it was fairly specifically about the need to support loading of multiple models inside the viewer, rather than working on the assumption that there’s a single model available. For the last few days I’ve been looking at another area that by all accounts will be beneficial, whether driven by use of the Tandem viewer or the upcoming Forge viewer based on the latest... Read more →

Vote on my (and others') AU 2022 class proposals

I’ve gone ahead and submitted two class proposals for Autodesk University 2022. If you think they should be part of this year’s event, I’d certainly appreciate you voting for them: Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Autodesk Research first created the Space Analysis toolkit - and its accompanying Dynamo package - to support 2D generative design workflows such as those used during Project Discover for the architectural layout of Autodesk's Toronto office. VASA - short for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis - takes these techniques to the next level, allowing the geometric exploration of architectural spaces in 3D for activities... Read more →

The recording of the March Tandem webinar

Last week’s webinar – where I was kindly invited by the Autodesk Tandem team to join them to talk about Autodesk Research’s explorations into the potential for Digital Twins in the AEC space, specifically through Project Dasher – has now been posted via the In Tandem website (under Resources). It’s also on YouTube, so you can watch it directly over there. One really interesting section was Tim Kelly’s demo (starting around the 26-minute mark) of work the Tandem team has been doing to integrate Dasher-like capabilities into the product. Really exciting stuff! Here’s a preview of that segment of... Read more →

Reminder: join the Autodesk Tandem webinar today to see the future of connected Digital Twins

Today I’ll be speaking with Tim, Bob and Adam from the Tandem team about the work we’ve been doing in Project Dasher and how this is influencing their own offering, moving forward. The webinar is today (March 9th, 2022) at 4pm GMT | 5pm CET | 11am Eastern | 8am Pacific. If you’ve read this post in time, sign up here! Read more →

Walk across the Dar Smart Bridge at BIM World Paris for free!

This is all very exciting. I’ve booked my TGV ticket for Paris to attend a physical, in-person event: BIM World Paris is being held on April 5th & 6th, 2022, at Porte de Versailles. Autodesk is sponsoring the event, and the Autodesk Research team will be using the opportunity to show off the work that was done on the 2m Dar Smart Bridge, something I’ve covered recently in some depth. I’ll be attending along with my friends and colleagues Pete Storey and Fikret Kalay. In preparation for the event, I’ve been remoting into the PC running the bridge’s “operating... Read more →

Join the Tandem webinar in March to see the future of Dasher

The Autodesk Tandem team have kindly invited me to join their regular webinar – coming up on March 9th – to talk about the history of Project Dasher and to participate in a more future-centric discussion with Bob Bray and Tim Kelly. Here’s the description of the webinar. Even I want to attend, it sounds so interesting! ;-) From the lens of a software architect, learn why digital twin is key to the future of build What will it take to win the digital twin race? Get a front row seat and join our very own Kean Walmsley, software... Read more →

Building the 2m Dar Smart Bridge

Colleagues in Autodesk Research have been working with Dar Al-Handasah on a project to 3D print a series of footbridges with integrated sensors. It’s similar in some ways to MX3D’s Smart Bridge Amsterdam, but printing with plastic rather than steel. I’ve talked about the bridge at a couple of events, now, so I thought it was time to share some more information about this fascinating project. My role in the project is, once again, fairly minor: I’ve been helping with the visualization of sensor data from the bridge inside Dasher (more on that later on), but it’s been fun... Read more →

The NEST exhibit at the new Autodesk Gallery

Last week this announcement was made that included a video showing off the sparkling new Autodesk Gallery at our 1 Market Street office in San Francisco. There’s a lot of inspiring content in the new Gallery – for instance it showcases the results of Autodesk Research’s collaboration with NASA JPL, the generatively designed interplanetary lander, and the scanning robot from Forge partner Scaled Robotics – but I wanted to highlight a project that I’ve participated in quite a bit, over the years, and I’m super-happy to see has a place in the stunning new Gallery: there’s a scale model... Read more →

The recording of last week's BIM Fórum Brasil event

Our friends at BIM Fórum Brasil have now posted the recording of last week’s event on Digital Twins. (If the last link says "We Couldn't Find This Page", just click on the Brazilian flag in the page header.) A big chunk of the session is in Portuguese, but my piece was in English. If you only understand English, I suggest skipping forward to the 20-minute mark. If you’ve heard me talk about this topic before, you might still want to check out the section on the Dar Smart Bridge project at the 35-minute mark. (Be ready to crank up... Read more →

Speaking at tomorrow’s BIM Fórum Brasil about Digital Twins

I’ve been asked to talk about our work on Digital Twins (or Gêmeos Digitais) at the BIM Fórum Brasil event, on Wednesday of this week (January 26th, 2022). The event starts at 10am in Brasilia, which is 2pm in Central Europe, so the timing should work well for Asia, Europe and early birds on the east coast of North America, too. I’ll be sharing information on our older projects, as usual, but I’m also planning to showcase some of our more recent (previously unseen) projects. So there’s likely to be new information even for people who have seen me... Read more →