Through the Interface

A special unveiling at AU 2022

The Autodesk Research team is currently printing something very special in our Boston Technology Center with the hope of it being displayed at Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans. I expect to be spending quite a bit of time near this object, during the event, and am very much looking forward to it. Even at this early stage it’s already a thing of great beauty. Now for some pre-AU fun and games: if you can guess the object’s function and how much it’ll weigh once finished – within an as-yet-undetermined threshold – then I’ll send you a souvenir from... Read more →

An eventful start to the summer

It’s been some time since I’ve shared any personal news, so I thought I’d throw a whole load of it together in an easily ignorable post. I’ve structured this post on themes, rather than chronologically, as it feels more coherent that way. The summer has been lovely this year, in Switzerland, which is in stark contrast to last year’s horror show. We haven’t been away anywhere much – as yet, at least – but I’ll explain more about that a bit later on. For us the summer thus far has largely been about music. We’ve taken the opportunity to... Read more →

Register now for Autodesk University 2022. I may even see you there!

Registration is now open for this year’s AU: the first time it’s been held in-person since 2019, and in a brand new city (for AU, at least), New Orleans. It’s being held from September 27th to 29th, which will be here really soon! The early-bird pricing of $1,750 is available until July 23rd, at which point it slides upwards to $1,999 until August 12th and then on up to the full price of $2,250 from there. And if you can’t make it in person to the event, there’s still the option to attend virtually for free. Registration for the... Read more →

3D printing with recycled PET at Autodesk London

I’m in London for a few days this week for some internal meetings and a customer visit. While visiting the Soho office I checked in with my Autodesk Research colleague Allin Groom about a project he and Matt Oosthuizen have undertaken to help reduce the impact of waste in the office. The inspiration for the project was an all too common problem: a lot of waste generated by employees – many of whom buy takeaway lunches at local shops and restaurants – comes in the form of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers. While this material is nominally recyclable, Allin and... Read more →

A paper on our space analysis algorithm in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

I’m very happy to share the news that a paper authored by current and former members of Autodesk Research has been published in the open access Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The paper is entitled “Path Counting for Grid-Based Navigation” and talks in depth about the algorithm developed to power the Space Analysis package for Dynamo. Here’s the paper’s abstract, to tickle your fancy: Counting the number of shortest paths on a grid is a simple procedure with close ties to Pascal’s triangle. We show how path counting can be used to select relatively direct grid paths for... Read more →

My new role at Autodesk Research

For the last few weeks I’ve been heads-down on various activities I can’t blog about. It does worry me that this may well be the shape of things to come, but I’m also hopeful it’s just a short-term blip, and that I’ll find a way to get back on the blogging horse before too long. Basically, within the Autodesk Research organisation we’re some way through a significant shift in the way we perform research, focusing on larger, more audacious – and ultimately more impactful – research goals rather than having a more piecemeal research approach with lots of smaller... Read more →

Another look at bundle optimization for Dasher

Back in September I talked a bit about using a plugin for Rollup – the package bundler we use for Project Dasher – to start optimizing the bundling and delivery of JavaScript code. Over the last few days I’ve come back to this topic, as I felt it was time to dig into some issues. Dasher has three primary pages: The index page, where you arrive when you visit the site. The projects dashboard, which you can access if you have login credentials for the site. The Dasher viewer page itself, which most of you will have accessed via... Read more →

A new book on Innovation in Construction

The Autodesk Construction Cloud team kindly shared a post on LinkedIn, last week, about a project I participated in. There’s a new book from Springer on “Innovation in Construction” for which I contributed a chapter called “Cutting-Edge Practical Research on Generative Design, IoT and Digital Twins”. This chapter weighs in at 29 pages – of an overall 454 for the book – and here’s its abstract: This chapter explores two areas of research undertaken by Autodesk over the last decade and how they both have the potential to impact the construction industry. The first area relates to the Internet... Read more →

The Autodesk Gallery opening and the 2m Dar Smart Bridge at DCW 2022

A few events have happened over the last few weeks that I would have loved to have attended, had I had the energy (and been in better shape). The first was the grand opening of the Autodesk Gallery on May 11th. I received an invite – because of my participation in the NEST project – but as I was planning on actually being at the NEST building that day I declined. And I ended up being home with Covid, so there’s that. The gallery was opened by SF Mayor London Breed. Here’s a snap of Andrew Anagnost showing the... Read more →

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 →