Through the Interface

At the Forge Hackathon, counting down to AU2021

While I’m unlikely to be present for much of next week’s Autodesk University event – all being well I’ll be in Sardinia – I have been feeling the excitement mount ahead of it. Mainly from attending the Forge Hackathon, which is now nearing it’s climax. The event kicked off with a really interesting event held via SpatialChat. I hadn’t used it before, but was immediately hooked. There were different rooms (fine), but even within a single room you could have private conversations by moving off into a corner. The sound increases as you get closer to a sound source,... Read more →

Build your first Digital Twin at the upcoming Forge Hackathon

Other that my regular foolings-around with ancient tech, I feel like I’ve been neglecting this blog in recent weeks. That’s all about to change, though, as we enter the busy period leading up to Autodesk University 2021. For one I have some interesting learnings I thought I’d share from some of the foundational work I’ve been doing on Dasher’s codebase, but there are also some interesting updates for people performing analyses of 2D (and 3D!) spaces. Fun stuff! First though, it’s worth reminding people of the Forge Hackathon that’s around the corner. It starts in just a couple of... Read more →

A new brand for a brand new Autodesk?

I’m sure many of you will already have seen Autodesk’s exciting new brand identity. To get a sense of what’s behind it, I recommend heading over to our Brand Hub, where you can get much of the background. It’s a very interesting read. Employees and partners have had some time to digest this change – and presumably start stocking up on black printer ink ;-) – and I fully admit that it took me a little while to “get” it. If you find it a bit too different, I do recommend giving it a few days/weeks to settle in.... Read more →

A new face in the Autodesk Tandem team

My friend and colleague Hali Larsen has joined the Autodesk Tandem team as a Product Manager focused on connected workflows and sustainability. This is huge news, for lots of reasons: for several years Hali played an absolutely instrumental role in Project Dasher – in many ways she was our de facto PM, but also worked through many gnarly issues related to bespoke configuration for various Dasher pilot projects. Hali has a wealth of experience working with customers in this space, and also knows where most of Dasher’s skeletons are buried, so she is the right person to take on... Read more →

Going viral during a pandemic

I’ve been getting quite a bit of unsolicited email of late. It started with this one, in late July: Hi Kean, Did you know that a QR code of your email address is currently being circulated all around the globe in a viral meme? Cheers, It came with a couple of images attached: Perhaps somewhat rudely I largely ignored it, as I thought it was some elaborate spam or phishing attempt. I did scan the QR codes and found some curious things encoded: my email address, the URL to blogs.autodesk.com, my old Autodesk office phone number, the location of... Read more →

AU 2021 update & MX3D on the AU blog

The count-down to Autodesk University 2021 continues, with registration for the event now open. I’ve gone ahead and registered, as I expect many of you will at some point during the remaining 54 days. It’s free, after all, and I’m sure will have lots of great content, as usual. Be sure to put the dates in your calendar – October 5-7 for the Americas, October 6-8 for EMEA & APAC, October 13-14 for East Asia. The timing of this year’s event – being several weeks earlier – means that it falls during our children’s half-term break. This year –... Read more →

Dynamo 2.12, MaRS v3 and the future of Space Analysis

The latest update to Dynamo Core (which for now you can use via Dynamo Sandbox) has some really interesting enhancements, both in terms of usability and performance. Check out Sol Amour’s two blog posts that introduce Dynamo Core 2.12. As it had been a while since I’d tried the MaRS graph in a new drop of Dynamo, I went ahead and loaded it. I immediately noticed a couple of things: it was referencing an old, now-deprecated version of the Solar Analysis package, so I updated to the latest & greatest version on my system and then reloaded the graph... Read more →

Using the Forge viewer? It’s time to switch to SVF2!

The big news on the Forge side of things over the last few weeks is probably the official release of SVF2. This is a more efficient streaming format the Forge viewer (from v7.25 onwards) can consume. We’ve been using SVF2 (which was previously known as OTG) for the last couple of years inside Project Dasher, and it’s been brilliant. If you’re interested in the technical details on SVF2, be sure to check the blog post that announced the SVF2 Beta from late last year. Just for instance, we’ve seen significant performance improvements from using SVF2 for our public demo... Read more →

Come and work for Autodesk Research in Pier 9!

San Francisco’s Pier 9 has got to one of the coolest Autodesk office locations to work from. You have access to all kind of cool technology, and it’s also full of pretty cool people, too. As a reminder, here’s an old post that shows the office, and here’s another that introduces the work we did there to prototype technology for the MX3D bridge. If this is the kind of work environment that gets you excited, then you may be even more excited to hear that our team is hiring for Senior Web Developer (someone with full stack development skills).... Read more →

Registration is now open for Autodesk University 2021

I’m a little late to the announcement party on this one – as I was busy gushing about the MX3D bridge, last week – but it does still feel like it’s worth posting a reminder to people. While it may seem like a long way away – as the event itself is in early October – it certainly doesn’t hurt to register early for AU, even when it’s free, virtual and with no restrictions on the number of participants (at least none that I’m aware of). The Forge team, for instance, has a number of plans to engage with... Read more →

Autodesk Tandem is now officially available

These are busy times in the world of digital twins at Autodesk! I'm thrilled to see the news that Autodesk Tandem has now officially launched. Head on over to the new landing page, intandem.autodesk.com, to find out more, or check out Bob Bray’s recent article. A few people have either been congratulating me or asking how this relates to Project Dasher, so I think it's worth clarifying the situation. Tandem is not Dasher, although I'd love to think that the Dasher story at least in some way influenced or inspired Tandem's trajectory. Tandem solves a fundamental industry problem that... Read more →

15 years of this blog

If you’re going to forget an anniversary, let it be the one for your first engagement with social media. The very definition of a victimless crime. I just remembered that it was back in June 2006 when I started this blog (the welcome post was on June 19th, 2006, so I didn’t miss it by much). It’s been quite the ride… 2021 posts over 15 years, at an average of about 2.6 posts per week, rain or shine. I always set myself the goal of 3 posts per week, but in recent years that’s dropped back to 2 or... Read more →

Applying heatmap power to single-sensor volumes

I’ve been heads-down on a side project to integrate a C++ library into Forge using Web Assembly (hopefully I’ll share more on this sometime soon). Thankfully while I’ve been busy on that, the Hyperion team has been beavering away on some changes to their core shader. Last week I realised – now that we have controls to adjust the confidence and power settings in the shader – that rooms with just one sensor have a uniform shading style. This was a deliberate choice we made, back when we initially implemented the shader, as we felt it would help highlight... Read more →

Enjoying an early summer quiet period? Attend next week’s Forge Accelerator!

Summer has finally started kicking in, here in Switzerland, which is wonderful. I saw this field of poppies, yesterday, which was simply stunning: the majority of the field was purple with a small border of red ones near the edges (although this doesn’t really come across in the photo). I hadn’t seen these poppies before, so did 30 seconds of Internet research to find out they were Papaver somniferum, commonly called the opium poppy. (It seems more likely that the field is being used for edible poppyseeds than being a hotbed of Swiss opium production, though.) Anyway, as the... Read more →

DevDays 2021, AutoCAD Web APIs and Forge Coffee Breaks

The material for this year’s online Autodesk DevDays is now live on YouTube. These sessions were held back in March, but now that the various products discussed have been released publicly, the information has been made available for everyone (i.e. not only covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement signed by Autodesk Developer Network members, the famously palindromic ADN NDA). Here’s the full playlist, if you want to watch it here: Here are links to the individual sessions: Autodesk DevDays 2021 keynotes Inventor, Vault and Fusion API update AutoCAD API update Revit API update Civil 3D update One interesting tidbit from... Read more →

Autodesk University 2021 will be in early October

The big news of the last week or so – although I’m well behind the curve, given prior announcements by the AU and Forge teams – is that the dates for Autodesk University 2021 have been fixed, and announced along with the event’s pricing. As anticipated from the somewhat early CFP process, this year’s AU will be held in early October. It wasn’t so long ago that AU was in December, so this is a significant shift for many – and will mean that speakers are likely to have to spend some time this summer getting their material together,... Read more →

Job postings in the Forge viewer team

It’s a holiday in most of Central Europe (including Switzerland), but I thought I’d quickly highlight a couple of interesting opportunities at Autodesk. I posted about one of these, a few weeks ago, but there’s another position that has come up, since then. The Forge viewer team is looking not just for a Senior Product Owner (as mentioned before) but also a Principle Software Engineer. Both roles are SF-based, but I suspect this is probably more a question of timezone than anything, given the way the world is changing. The successful applicants are likely to have involvement in the... Read more →

It’s officially available: Data Visualization Extension for the Forge Viewer

The big news from this week (for me, anyway, aside from a very enjoyable Star Wars Day, yesterday) is that Project Hyperion has been released officially to the public as the Forge Viewer’s Data Visualization Extension. All you need to do is to use it is to start making use of the Forge Viewer from v7.42 (it is available in earlier versions, but this is the most complete version) and then take a look at the extensive online documentation. Congratulations to the Hyperion team for this major milestone! The work that has been done by that team to engineer... Read more →

My AU 2021 class proposal on integrating Hyperion with Dasher

On Friday I went ahead and submitted my one and only class proposal for the all-digital Autodesk University 2021. Let’s hope it gets selected. In case you’re interested, here’s the content of the proposal: Title: Dasher and Hyperion: using Data Visualization in a Forge viewer application Class ID: SD500020 Product(s): Forge Topics: Building Information Modeling (BIM), Building Operations, Internet of Things (IoT), Software Development Session Description Autodesk Research started Project Dasher in 2009 to explore the possibilities around integrating IoT data with BIM. In 2016 it was ported to work on the Forge platform, to understand the feasibility and... Read more →

The last week to submit your AU 2021 class proposal

It’s come around quickly, I know. At the end of next week the CFP closes for Autodesk University 2021 – it’s really time to submit! This year’s AU is being held a touch earlier than usual: I don’t believe the specific dates have been shared, as yet, but given the timing of this year’s CFP I’d expect it to be a month or so earlier than last year. I’ll be putting the finishing touches on my own class proposal over the coming days, and will share it early next week. This quick post is really just a quick reminder... Read more →