Through the Interface

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 →

Using VASA with Forma via Dynamo

I’ve been talking quite a bit about our use of VASA inside Forma via our WebAssembly build of the toolkit (which is still not currently available publicly). I’ve done quite a lot of work to improve that particular prototype and I’m happy to say it’s shaping up nicely: the UX is much better than it was, for instance. I’ll be talking about our work on this at an upcoming Autodesk-internal tech conference, and as part of the preparation for this I’ve spent a few days building a pure Dynamo equivalent of the extension. VASA’s Dynamo package is available in... Read more →

Are we in the same neighborhood? Looking at how 2D adjacencies map to 3D

Rhys Goldstein has had one more excellent article published in Towards Data Science. This is the third - and he says final, I hope he’s wrong - article in the series. Here they are, along with my accompanying posts: A Short and Direct Walk with Pascal’s Triangle Explaining how path counting helps simulate natural navigation A Quick and Clear Look at Grid-Based Visibility Visibility in Space Analysis: an explainer A Sharp and Solid Outline of 3D Grid Neighborhoods This post. :-) In this latest installment, Rhys explores one particular aspect of what it means to go from a 2D... Read more →

Left to My Own Devices: I join the TRXL podcast for episode 152

Some weeks ago I joined Evan Troxel for a couple of hours to chat about my journey and some of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve enjoyed the TRXL podcast for some time, so it was a real honour to be invited on. Our discussion has just been published as episode 152. If you prefer video, here’s the version from YouTube: Evan’s a great interviewer: I enjoyed the session a great deal and I hope you do, too. Listening back to it I realize there’s a lot more we could have talked about… hopefully Evan will invite me back... Read more →

Combining a translucent VASA visibility cone with intersecting Forma geometry

A very quick update on my holiday “fun”. After a bit of work I managed to combine two VASA voxel models - one for the visibility cone and one for its intersection with Forma’s site surroundings, something we saw last time - into a single Forma mesh. You can hopefully see that the performance is very decent, and the translucent, fog-like effect of the cone to be a reasonable visual complement to the intersection area. I ended up going through the extra effort to combine them both into a single mesh - putting the vertices together as well as... Read more →

Intersecting VASA's visibility cones with the surroundings inside Forma

This week I’m up in the mountains with my family. It’s my younger children’s winter half-term break, but as I do have a few meetings to attend during the week I decided to only take half days off: snowboarding in the morning and working in the afternoons. I found some time between meetings to work on the VASA inside Forma prototype. My goal for the week was to have the visibility cones displayed for our proposal building - something we saw in the last few posts - intersect with the surrounding geometry, whether other buildings or greenery of some... Read more →

More work on VASA inside Forma

This week I’ve been continuing some of the work I did during the recent Forma Hackathon in Oslo. Part of this was using the Forma Elements API to extract information about buildings included in the “proposal” being developed. For the Hackathon I’d hardcoded the size of the buildings - the number of floors and the heights of each floor - but the Forma team (thanks, Vilde!) has been helping me figure out how to get this information from Forma. In a nutshell, it’s possible to get the grossFloorAreaPolygons for the building of interest and then analyze the associated data:... Read more →

My VASA demo from this week's Forma Hackathon

I’m now back from Oslo, and decided to record the demo I delivered there at the end of the Forma Hackathon (or something approximating it, as I used twice as much time as we were each allocated on the day). Here’s a photo shared by the event organizers of me talking: Here’s the video I recorded this morning: As I mentioned at the end of the video, the capabilities I’ve demoed inside this Forma extension could also be implemented using Dynamo for Forma. That’s probably something I’ll blog more about, at some point, if there’s enough interest. Read more →

Forma Hackathon in Oslo

On Monday I headed to Zurich airport with our eldest son to hop across to Oslo. He’s between semesters at Uni - waiting for his exam results to trickle in - and it’s great we’re getting the chance to get a change of air for a few days. It’s rare that I sit in a window seat, so I was sure to capture the view as we left Zurich... … and arrived in snowy Oslo. The weather had impacted our trip very slightly - a 30-minute delay to our 2-hour flight - but we were still happy to touch... Read more →

Summer internships at Autodesk Research

Photo by Vecteezy My team has a number of internships posted for the coming summer. If you or a family member is interested in working at Autodesk Research - something I can strongly recommend - then an internship is a great way to see whether we're a good fit. Intern, Machine Learning & Computational Design Intern, AI for Architecture, Engineering & Construction Intern, Neuroscience for Architecture There are many more internship positions posted on the Autodesk Careers site, too, both in other parts of Research and the broader company. Be sure to check them out! Read more →

Season's greetings

This may well be my last post of 2023, so I thought I’d take the time to say a quick thank you to all of who have read and commented on this blog (whether here or on social media channels) over the course of the year. I don’t post as much as I once did - due to the nature of my role, these days - but every interaction with the broader community is precious to me. So here’s a little GIF of Autodesk’s seasonal greetings cards to say “thanks”. :-) Looking forward to next year… we’ve just heard... Read more →

Settling into the holiday spirit

It feels good to be easing into the end of the year after a hectic - but fantastic - AU 2023. For me it started with the Autodesk Switzerland holiday gathering in Bern. I was able to catch up with Jeremy Tammik, who I’m happy to say is recovering very well after a 6m (!) fall. The week after I was invited along to the Lausanne Christmas Market for some hot wine and fondue with the team - and other fellow interviewees - from the Conversation Constructive podcast. (My episodes will be airing in the new year, in case... Read more →

AU 2023 class materials: Monitoring and Visualizing Data from the MX3D and Dar Smart Bridges

After yesterday’s post pointing folks to the material for my first class at AU 2023, here’s the material for the second one, which I co-presented with Pete Storey. I only have this photo from outside the classroom for this session: But I did get to hang out with Pete before we flew back to our respective European ports on the Thursday after AU was over. Here's the summary without audio: Here’s the material posted for the class on the AU website: Class recording Presentation slides Handout Read more →

AU 2023 class materials: Channeling Minecraft to Analyze Architectural Spaces with VASA and Dynamo

The recordings and other materials prepared for the two classes I helped present at AU 2023 are now available online. In today’s post I’ll point you to the first class, entitled "Channeling Minecraft to Analyze Architectural Spaces with VASA and Dynamo". This one was one of the first sessions of AU 2023, and had a very good crowd in attendance. Here are a few photos from the live session. Thanks again to Fernando Malard for snapping them. I already posted a quick summary of the content (without audio) - here that is again. Here is the material posted for... Read more →

Capturing the human experience of the built environment

Now that the dust has settled on another Autodesk University (the best one ever?) it’s a good time to revisit what brought our team to AU, this year. I realize that I've posted a lot of pictures of people wearing helmets and high visibility vests without really explaining what it was all about. Our team at Autodesk Research has been very focused on understanding the human experience of the built environment, with the ultimate goal of making our software tools better at helping our customers design human-centric spaces. Spaces that emphasize occupant well-being in its various forms. Humans are... Read more →

AU 2023 Day 3

The last day of AU started, once again with me checking out the Sphere. I have to say that since the Las Vegas Grand Prix has been getting really close the quality of the content has become a bit meh, at least from my perspective. (I think I really like the AI-based art rather than endless commercials for brands I don't care about.) The expo opened earlier on Day 3 - at 10am - and with no general sessions to compete with the flow of people to the stand - and the participation in the study - was very... Read more →

AU 2023 Day 2

My second day at this year's Autodesk University started with another lovely sunrise. After breakfast I spent an hour or so writing my Day 1 blog post in the Community Zone before I realised a queue was forming to enter the general session. I wandered over and joined it - quite near the front - and chatted with a number of people who were clearly very excited about listening to the day's guest speaker. Here are the people waiting in the Community Zone for the general session to open its doors. I found a single seat free in the... Read more →

AU 2023 Day 1

After a great trip to Stanford on Friday, we had some last-minute preparation to do for our AU exhibit at Pier 9 on Saturday morning. We headed into the office - after having to explain our way through a security cordon along the waterfront due to APEC 2023 - and printed out a bunch of legal waivers for study participants to sign. It seems APEC will be impacting our SF employees, with the offices being closed during the AU week. Enough people had warned me about craziness at SFO that I ended up at the airport well ahead of... Read more →

In SF ahead of AU 2023

On Wednesday I headed back across to Zurich airport to fly to San Francisco for a few days ahead of Autodesk University 2023 in Las Vegas. The flight was direct and largely uneventful: I didn't sleep but did feel moderately sane when I arrived in SF. I hopped on BART from the airport to Embarcadero - it's really the best mode of transport if you arrive around 5pm. My room in the Hyatt has a view across SF’s financial district. Here’s a picture I snapped before sleeping... … and one on waking. I always like seeing the view towards... Read more →