Through the Interface

Bundle optimization in Project Dasher

I mentioned recently that I’ve been working on updating Project Dasher’s use of 3rd party components, and that I had some learnings to share. We started the Forge-based version of Dasher in 2016, and (much to my shame) some of the components had stayed at more-or-less the version available at that time, largely due to the migration effort needed to deal with breaking changes. Biting the bullet to upgrade them was painful but necessary, and right now I (and Dasher) feel nicely refreshed. Last time I mentioned there were two big outstanding dependencies that still required attention: Bootstrap and... 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 minor makeover – and a lot of core work – for Dasher

Over the last week I’ve been heads-down on core Dasher work, but with very little visible result. Here’s why. Early last week I received an email telling me that it was time to dig into Dasher’s use of 3rd party components and make sure there weren’t any security issues. (This isn’t something unusual – all our products go through this, and many of our research projects, too.) As anyone working on web development projects will know, it’s important to go through from time to time to reduce the technical debt that accumulates due to the use of old libraries... 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 →

Previewing and viewing PDFs inside Dasher

A couple of days ago we were looking for the datasheets for the various sensors installed in the MX3D bridge: as you’ve probably already read, there are nearly a hundred sensors in and on the bridge, although of only about eight different model types. My colleague Josh Cameron said, in passing, “it would be really handy to have these datasheets integrated into Dasher!”. As usual, this sent me down a rather fun rabbit-hole for a day or so, to see how we might reasonably integrate these PDFs into Dasher. Firstly it’s worth pointing out that these days the Forge... 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 →

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 →

Data from the MX3D smart bridge

The MX3D team first showed the smart bridge to the public back in October 2018 at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. I was there with the team to finish and test features such as realtime display of skeletons detected using computer vision. Here’s a reminder of how that went: An interesting aspect of the public’s response to the bridge at DDW2018 was that it had broad appeal to people but that people appreciated different aspects of the project: The majority view: “wow, what a cool-looking bridge!” Those who dug a little deeper: “it was 3D-printed by robots? Interesting –... Read more →

The MX3D bridge opens to the public

On Wednesday afternoon I headed back across to Zurich airport for my second trip to Amsterdam in as many weeks. This time I was flying with Swiss rather than KLM, and ended up checking in and boarding through an area of the airport I didn’t recognise at all. Whether this was because it had been so long since I’d been there or due to some deep refurbishment being completed during the pandemic remains to be seen. By the time I arrived in Amsterdam, things had progressed significantly with the MX3D bridge. Here’s a fun staged photo by Thijs Wolzak... 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 →

The light at the end of the… smart bridge

This weekend I had a very strange task to perform: I had to book travel for work. Remembering how our corporate travel system worked was just one hurdle to cross – beyond that I had to deal with getting the appropriate management and travel department approvals, along with the fact I’ve booked a separate ticket for my 16-year old son to come along, and wanted to be 100% sure that we’re on the same flight. Was life really this complicated pre-pandemic? I’m sure I’ll get used to it all again, before long. The reason I’m travelling is pretty exciting,... 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 →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 2

In the first post in this series we looked at how a heatmap can be used to shade an object using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension – or Project Hyperion. In our case we shaded the surface of the MX3D bridge. In this post we look at a slightly different use-case for this mechanism, where we want to shade a piece of geometry inside the model based on the value of a particular sensor. To be clear: this is about shading the entire object a uniform colour that varies based on the value of the sensor that’s providing... 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 →

Setting the vertical position of planar heatmaps

In a recent post we talked about the integration of Hyperion’s planar heatmap capability into Dasher. Towards the end of that post, I mentioned that the Hyperion team was looking into exposing some way to place planar heatmaps not only at the minimum and maximum vertical locations in the bounding box, but at levels in-between. The team has delivered this more quickly than I expected, and you’ll be able to try it for yourselves in v7.45 of the Forge viewer. While I was adding the sliders needed for the capabilities shown in the last post, I went ahead and... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 1

Over the next few posts – in this series, anyway – we’re going to take a look at the shading of objects (actually meshes) using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (Project Hyperion). This is something we’ve done in Dasher for some time, and I was excited that using Hyperion would once again allow us not only to rip out some of our old code but also to go in new directions and explore interesting new capabilities. Let’s first explain how this type of shading differs from what we’ve seen in previous posts, namely volumetric room and planar shading:... 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 →

Integrating Hyperion's planar heatmaps into Dasher

Having spent time recently looking at integrating sprites and volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher, today we move on to a capability that we didn’t have previously but has been enabled by Project Hyperion (i.e. the new Data Visualization Extension for the Forge viewer): planar heatmaps. Planar heatmaps do just what you’d expect: they display a heatmap for 3D geometry in a plane. This means you can display a heatmap on the floor or ceiling of rooms, or place them on tables or work surfaces. They might – for instance – be used to indicate usage of an area, such... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher – Part 2

I was thinking back on last week’s post regarding the work needed to integrate Hyperion’s volumetric heatmaps into Dasher, and realised that – despite the relative length of the post – I’d really glossed over the process for integrating heatmaps and using them to display sensor data. So I’ve retroactively gone back and marked that post as “Part 1”, with this post being “Part 2”. That’s not to say the process is especially complicated, but I felt it was a bit of a cop out to say “just follow the documentation”, as there was a little more to it... Read more →