Through the Interface

Halloween and 3D skeletons

This year’s Halloween was destined to disappoint: we’d held out some hope until the 30th that the kids (which just means our youngest, at this point) would end up being able to go trick-or-treating in our village. Understandably – but disappointingly – the announcement came that any kind of trick-or-treating was off the cards for this Halloween. Stricter rules about groups of people were also announced, but with effect from today. From today onwards any kind of public or private event can have a maximum of 5 people present. Given the acceleration of cases in Switzerland, this is completely... Read more →

My new AI chairs

After having talked about Autodesk Research’s collaboration with Philippe Starck and Kartell to create the world’s first mass-produced, generatively-designed (and made from 100% recycled material!) chair, I decided to buy one. Well, two. As I mentioned in the talk I gave at the SDSC-Connect event, I didn’t find a way to get an employee discount, but I’m proud enough of the work done by my colleagues in Research to put more money than I would normally into a couple of plastic chairs. This almost certainly makes my presentation for the SDSC-Connect event the most expensive I’ve ever given, at... Read more →

AU 2020 material is in the bag, a few upcoming talks

This year has been strange at so many levels that it seems a bit petty to highlight one particular area. But preparing material for Autodesk University 2020 has certainly been one such area, and it’s very fresh in the mind of AU speakers around the world. With this year’s event being all digital, it’s clear that the AU team had to find a way to get classes delivered remotely: one option would have been to live-stream them all, but at some point the decision was made to get everything pre-recorded for on-demand delivery. (On-demand classes are not the only... Read more →

The new Types By Level panel in Project Dasher

Over the last month or so we’ve been focused on the benefits brought to Project Dasher by combining 2D heatmaps with our traditionally 3D view of the world. We started by creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level, before introducing the idea of overlaying building systems information, too. Most recently we took a sneak peek at the topic of today’s post, a new UI that simplifies access to these 2D (and 3D) heatmaps. The idea came up during a team meeting: as we realised we had this combinatorial... Read more →

My generative design presentation from SDSC-Connect 2020 and a teaser for AU 2020

From one online conference to another. Here’s the recording published by the Swiss Data Science Center for last week’s SDSC-Connect event. I’ve set it to start at the beginning of my session – which in 30 minutes takes a whirlwind look at four generative design projects run by Autodesk Research – but the other sessions are also likely to be of interest to people, so feel free to scrub backwards! Next week I’ll be busy recording my AU 2020 session and finishing up the handout. Here’s a teaser for this year’s all-digital event: I’m supposed to be on holiday,... Read more →

A sneak peek at Dasher’s new Types By Level UI

This week has been a little crazy in terms of presentations. On Monday it kicked off with an internal project review followed by a presentation to a class of Masters students from the University of Southern California (it was a lunchtime session for them, so it was a late evening one for me). It wrapped up yesterday with the generative design session for the Swiss Data Science Center, which despite a few technical hitches (not on my side, thankfully) seemed to go pretty well. I was told there were upwards of 400 attendees registered for the event, but I... Read more →

Register for Thursday’s SDSC-Connect event for free

Earlier this year, the Swiss Data Science Center kindly invited me to deliver a session on generative design at their October 1st SDSC-Connect event, entitled “Enhancing discovery and creativity with AI”. A perfect umbrella topic for a session on GD! The event was originally going to be held in-person in Zurich, but with recent developments it became clear that it would have to be held online. This is bad and good, of course: it’s bad because I won’t get to meet attendees in person – and they sound like a really interesting group of people – and it’s good... Read more →

Adding building systems to Dasher’s 2D heatmaps

As a recap, so far in this series we’ve looked at creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Project Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level. There are two main tasks left for the completed feature – which will form the core of my upcoming class for AU2020 – which are to add information on building systems and to implement a UI to make these new views easier to access. Today we’re focusing on adding building system information. Let’s first step back and talk about why this is important… One of the key insights we’ve... Read more →

Register now for Autodesk University 2020!

It’s been a crazy year, but there’s comfort to be had in certain things going ahead despite the craziness. For me Autodesk University is one of these things: my first AU was back in the year 2000, and I’ve probably only missed a few in the last two decades. This year’s AU experience will be 100% virtual but also 100% free, so I’m really excited that so many more people will be able to experience AU! As of Wednesday, registration is now open for this year’s AU. It’s quick and easy – no need to fill out credit card... Read more →

Get the latest information on Project Dasher at this week’s KEA BIM Café Talk

I’ve been invited to talk about Project Dasher at the KEA BIM Café Talk on Wednesday of this week. Many thanks to Aske Strandberg for organising and moderating this event. It’s being held online (of course) at 4pm CET on Wednesday September 16th. The session is primarily targeted at students from KEA – the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology – but guests are very welcome. If you’d like to join, feel free to sign up here. I’ll be sharing a number of really cool enhancements I’ve been making to Dasher during the pandemic-related travel ban – only some... Read more →

Pinning 2D heatmaps per-level in Project Dasher

So far in this series we’ve looked at creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, and then adding lots of them inside Project Dasher. I’ve mentioned a few times – and I’ve seen the same commented via LinkedIn – that viewing data from multiple building floors at the same time would be beneficial. As a reminder, here’s what happens when you change floors with the current implementation: The UX to implement some kind of “pinning” mechanism was non-trivial, but possible. The way I ended up thinking about this was as follows: We still want generic panels that will show data... Read more →

Viewing multiple heatmaps inside Project Dasher

In the last couple of posts in this series, we looked at how we’ve been able to include a 2D heatmap view inside Project Dasher and make it resizable via a square, transparent panel. This post is really just to let you know that we’ve now extended the capability to support multiple heatmaps, which is particularly interesting if you want to compare data from different sensor types across the floor of a building. (I often say that the value in a tool like Dasher is in its ability to correlate multiple streams of data – such as occupancy with... Read more →

Creating a resizable square panel inside the Forge viewer

In this recent post we looked at a new 2D heatmap capability that we’ve added to Project Dasher. In this post we look at what was needed to make this heatmap resizable – but with a fixed aspect ratio – as well as being movable and displayed with a transparent background. Luckily, this previous post shows how to create a transparent, movable window – which we already use to show our surface shading legend – so we were able to use that as a basis for today’s implementation. Firstly, let’s take a look at it working. Note the fact... Read more →

Project Dasher at Kingspan’s IKON building

A nice article was published recently on Redshift regarding Kingspan’s new IKON building. The article focuses particularly on describing how IKON furthers Kingspan’s commitment to innovation and sustainability. In this post I thought we’d look in a bit more detail at how Autodesk Research has been involved in the IKON project, specifically regarding the deployment of sensor and camera technology to help create a digital twin of IKON inside Project Dasher. IKON is Kingspan’s new headquarters and global innovation centre at Kingscourt in County Cavan, Ireland. Here’s an introductory video that talks about this project and shows a couple... Read more →

Displaying a 2D heatmap when surface shading inside Dasher

A week or two ago, I had a meeting with some colleagues to discuss future needs for Project Dasher. One of these requirements related to an exhibit where we’re going to want to ignore all the 3D visualization of sensor data, and focus on the 2D case (I.e. where we shade a 2D floorplan with the sensor values). When this came up I thought to myself “oh, this could be a good driver for us implementing a 2D workflow inside Dasher”, something I’ve chewed on in the past. This time around, I started off thinking about whether to use... Read more →

Exploring minimum and maximum data ranges in Dasher

Last week I posted about how roll-ups in the time-series back-end used by Project Dasher enable some interesting visualization opportunities. When my colleague Hali Larsen saw the post, she made a really interesting suggestion: It would be cool if the user could select whether the heatmap visualizes the Max, Min, or Average of the data for the selected rollup. (Yet another drop down...) The advantage would be that someone looking for a feature in the data would see the "spikes" whereas when you use the rollups as they currently work you lose a lot of the variability of colour... 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 →

Data resolutions in Project Dasher

When we started developing Dasher in late 2009 – back then it had a desktop client – one of the main drivers was around providing an interface to explore IoT data (at the time measuring building performance) responsively in a 3D context. To do this we knew that we needed some way to summarize the raw sensor data at different levels of detail: there was no way we could wait around for the client to query years of sensor data in order to visualize a high-level summary, for instance. In our time-series back-end the team developed a mechanism we... Read more →

Autodesk Research is hiring experienced software developers and designers!

These days I belong to the Research Engineering team at Autodesk, headed by Tony Ruto. (Tony joined Autodesk with the acquisition of Within Technologies, back at the end of 2014, where he was CTO.) Tony’s team is a shared resource for the various “Core Science” and “Industry Futures” teams within Autodesk Research: we help develop prototypes and platform capabilities that are used elsewhere in the organisation, and also have members of our team embedded within these other teams. The team is growing, which is quite exciting: there are a number of open positions that I’d encourage you to share... Read more →

AEC Hackathon, CanBIM recordings & AU class voting

This post is a bit of a grab-bag of various event-related topics. The first one (chronologically, if not in terms of the title above) is the availability of session recordings from the recent CanBIM event: “The Future of Work: Designing Resiliency and Building Work Safety Post-COVID”. My own session was entitled “Using Generative Design and Digital Twins to Improve Occupant Well Being”. As it was the first session of the day – with a new web streaming platform – there were a few teething issues for the sponsor’s introduction (and the session auto-closed a little too promptly, which meant... Read more →