Through the Interface

Introducing the LMV Developer Tools (and LMV Ninja)

A few weeks ago I came across an internal link to a new Chrome extension that greatly simplifies the act of working with the Forge viewer (which we refer to inside Autodesk as LMV, or the Large Model Viewer). Earlier this week its developer, Amit Diamant (who some of you may remember from the Big Room Hackathon project) reached out to let me know it was being made public. This was really good news, as these Developer Tools contain some features I know will benefit the community (as I’m already using them myself). The first killer feature is the... Read more →

AI in AEC 2021

Next week the Finnish Association of Civil Engineers (RIL) is holding a virtual conference on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Architecture, Engineering and Construction called AI in AEC 2021. The agenda looks really compelling. These are the presentation tracks, to give you a sense for the topics covered: Data Driven Design Generative Design Impactful AI Project Management Natural Language Processing Smart Buildings Circular Economy Data Analytics Quality Control & Verification Autonomous Construction There are three keynote presentations: two at the opening of the conference at 10am CET on March 24th, while the third (which I’ve been asked to... Read more →

DevDays Online and another "Build Your Own Dasher" Forge Accelerator

I’m currently up in the mountains with my family, enjoying the annual school closure for the kids’ “ski week”. I recognise we’re especially lucky, this year, given that a) Swiss ski resorts are open and b) our kids are at school physically rather than remotely. Spring seems to be hitting early, this year, but even if the snow’s a little soft, the sun is very welcome. Here’s a shot where we’re sitting at the top of a run as a rescue helicopter takes off (this is never good to see, but it is often impressive): Yesterday we went to... Read more →

Enhancing exploration of sensor data inside Dasher

I added a “simple” feature to Project Dasher (although it’s not live just yet) the other day, that I think is worth sharing some information about – especially as from a UX perspective it’s completely hidden and amounts to an Easter egg. For a particular project I’ve been searching through sensor data for time periods that tell an interesting story. In Dasher the simplest way to explore the data for one or more sensors (as you can add multiple sensors to a single chart by holding down the Shift key when you click on a sensor) is to use... Read more →

Animating stacked heatmaps in Dasher

Last week I mentioned some feedback I’d received from our HCI & Visualization team regarding the possibility of animating the heatmaps in the Types By Level UI. (Prior to this the Types By Level feature has really just been a legend for quick access to per-level heatmaps: I stopped short of attempting to animate the individual heatmaps while the timeline is playing.) For some background, the Types By Level feature is a stack of “cards” that each displays data from a particular sensor type for a specific floor using a 2D heatmap. These cards are rendered as individual textures... Read more →

Adding dividers to Dasher’s Types By Level UI

Last week I had a valuable discussion with members of our talented HCI and Visualization research team. They had reached out with the offer to perform “live science” review session for other teams’ research projects – with a particular focus on Human Computer Interaction and Visualization, of course – and I jumped at the opportunity. We sat down and talked through some of the recent work that had been done in Project Dasher to implement a multi-level UX that allows users to go from a top-level summary view to bring up individual 2D heatmap panels and a central 3D... Read more →

DevDays Online 2021

At the beginning of March our Developer Advocacy and Support team will be running its annual series of DevDays Online events. The first week will focus on public information – mainly news related to the Forge platform – while the second week will be for Autodesk Developer Network members, and focus mainly on our desktop products and APIs. You can find more complete information here, and register via the links below: For everyone March 2 – DevDays Keynotes – Jim Quanci March 3 – Forge API update – Augusto Goncalves March 4 – Autodesk Construction Cloud and API update... Read more →

Realtime collaboration inside the Forge viewer: a hackathon project

Just before the holiday break I had an interesting chat with Elias Cohenca (someone I’ve mentored on and off over the last few years). He was about to participate in his 6th annual hackathon in the Tel Aviv office, and wanted to bounce a few ideas off me regarding technologies. Our Tel Aviv office has held these hackathons – named Bazinga, after Sheldon Cooper’s catchphrase in the Big Bang Theory – since 2015. Elias has used the hackathon to try out some really interesting concepts, over the years, from adding BIM 360 issues into a mixed-reality environment using HoloLens... Read more →

Hyperion at last week’s Forge Accelerator

Last week was a big week for the team developing the Data Visualization Extension (codenamed Hyperion) for the Forge viewer. And for the Dasher team, of course, who were very excited to see what our development partners can do with the new Dasher-like capabilities being built into Forge. As it’s still early days for the extension, the decision was made to limit the number of organisations (I won’t say companies, as a university was included) who would work with Hyperion to just 5. With hindsight this was a very wise decision, as there were a number of teething issues... Read more →

The MX3D bridge on Quarantime

My friend and incredibly inspiring former colleague, Mickey McManus, has been co-hosting a regular (I want to say weekly) live-streamed event under the name of Quarantime. They’ve just posted the 51st episode (which means they must be doing this more than once per week) which featured another friend and current colleague, Alec Shuldiner. Alec has been the real workhorse driving forward the MX3D Smart Bridge project and Autodesk’s involvement in it. He joined Quarantime to talk about the project in the context of our cities’ future digital infrastructure. Here’s a snapshot with Project Dasher as a backdrop: It’s really... Read more →

’Tis the season to build Dasher

During the last week the kids have been opening their Advent calendars, we had a visit from St. Nicholas (I’ve talked before about this central European tradition), and the Candy Cane accelerator has kicked off. All-in-all things are starting to feel very festive! (And yes, Dasher is one of Santa’s reindeer, so there’s that, too.) The accelerator has upwards of 30 companies and academic partners in attendance, with 5 or so of these focused on “building their own Dasher” using the upcoming Data Visualization Extension for the Forge viewer (Project Hyperion). Yesterday I presented a session on Project Dasher... Read more →

Build Your Own Dasher during the upcoming Forge Accelerator

Forge Accelerators have always been BYOD. First they were “Bring Your Own Device”, then (on going virtual) they were also “Bring Your Own Drinks” and now for the upcoming event – on December 7-11 2020 – we’re giving people the opportunity to “Build Your Own Dasher”. BYOD3! Attendees at the Candy Cane accelerator (love those codenames) will get early access to to the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension – and the source code for the reference application that shows how to use it – which will greatly simplify the process of building a Digital Twin using Forge. (Something that... Read more →

My AU 2020 class Q&A

Yesterday evening was the Q&A for my Autodesk University 2020 class, Lessons from Project Dasher: Building a Digital Twin Using Forge. People registered for AU you can use the above link to access the recording for the next 30 days. Just click on the Join Now button: I really wasn’t sure what to expect from this session – having a full hour dedicated to questions! – but I think it went OK. There were a few speedbumps: the assigned moderator for my class was busy elsewhere and so only arrived partway through. It’s AU week, so I understood, and... Read more →

Autodesk Tandem and the Forge Viewer Data Visualization Extension

Yesterday was a great day for people interested in Digital Twins (among lots of other topics, of course). During the AU 2020 General Session and the AEC Keynote we heard about Autodesk Tandem, a new product and platform for creating Digital Twins from BIM. During the Forge Keynote, we heard about the Forge viewer’s new Data Visualization Extension, which simplifies the mapping of (for instance) sensor data into the viewer. I’ve had lots of questions already about how these announcements relate to Project Dasher and the work we’ve been doing in Autodesk Research. Some of these are covered in... Read more →

Fancy a chat during AU 2020?

And so it begins: today is the first day of Autodesk University 2020 (at least in the US), to be enjoyed (most probably) from the comfort of your home office or living room. We are now at well over 100,000 registrations, which is simply unbelievable. Many on Twitter are lamenting (or more likely relishing) the fact they’re not travelling to Las Vegas, dealing with jetlag, dehydration, cracked lips (viva los chapstick), lack of daylight (not good when dealing with the aforementioned jetlag), passive smoke inhalation, slot machine noise pollution and, yes, alcohol poisoning. I do miss the in-person contact... Read more →

Build your AU 2020 schedule today

It’s time: the full, interactive schedule for this year’s all-digital Autodesk University is now online. You can go ahead and start bookmarking your favourite classes today. Assuming you’re one of the 85,000 (and counting!) people who have registered for the event. If you haven’t already registered, don’t worry: you can still do so for free. (There are still plenty of tickets left. ;-) So to get things rolling, here’s a link to my AU 2020 class for you to bookmark and watch from November 17th. You can expect some interesting news to be announced (or at least repeated) in... Read more →

Kicking off the pre-AU Forge Hackathon

‘Twas the week before AU, when all around the globe, developers began coding, into Forge did they probe. Unknown Before Autodesk University kicks off, next week, our Developer Advocacy and Support team is running the inaugural Forge Hackathon. I talked about this event a month ago: hopefully some of you saw that and decided to sign up. By all accounts it’s well subscribed, either way: I see 45 team channels in Slack, and people have started talking about their various hacks. We started today with an introduction for Asia and Europe. Cyrille Fauvel kicked things off and introduced –... Read more →

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 →

Getting started with Forge

For this week’s talk for 10,000 codeurs, my friend Jaime Rosales kindly put together some great slides that give a really succinct introduction to the Forge platform, including a number of helpful links to various online resources. I made a few edits to make sure people could use the links in the exported PDF along with a few cosmetic tweaks, but otherwise the content is all Jaime’s. At some point I may take the time to convert the content into native web elements (there are some cool animated GIFs for the various demos, for instance), but in the meantime... 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 →