Through the Interface

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 →

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 →

Integrating Hyperion's volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher – Part 1

Today’s post is a follow-on from the first part where we looked at integrating Hyperion sprites into Dasher. (The posts are independent, though, so you don’t have to read the first one if you’re only interested in integrating heatmaps.) I was supposed to publish this at the beginning of the week, but I ended up getting bogged down by a couple of urgent projects – both of which I’m happy to say have led to me making some interesting enhancements to Dasher, which is, at least, something. Anyway, the topic I wanted to share is the approach for integrating... 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 →

Integrating Hyperion sprites into Dasher

As mentioned on Monday, I’ve been having lots of fun getting Hyperion to work inside Dasher, this week. All good preparation for the AU class I hope will be accepted for this year’s conference. Right now I have sprites working, which is an important first step (and doesn’t actually involve any of the more gnarly, data-related issues I expect to have when w tackle surface shading/heatmaps). In this post we’re going to step through the main steps taken to make this happen, but also to describe some of the important changes that were needed to make it all work... 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 →

Come work on Hyperion to help drive Data Visualization with Forge

The Forge viewer team is seeking to hire a San Francisco-based Senior Product Owner for Project Hyperion, the technology being made available as the Data Visualization Extension. (If you’re not familiar with the term Product Owner then in fairness you’re probably not a good fit for this position – the successful candidate will have PO experience – but here’s a link that may be of interest to you if you want to understand more about what’s involved.) This team is part of our Engineering organisation, but there are certainly connections to the work we’re doing over in Research: they... Read more →

Forge Viewer Data Visualization Extension now in public Beta

Last week Autodesk’s Developer Advocacy and Support team organised their second Forge Accelerator where developers could prototype Digital Twins using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (codenamed Hyperion). The first of these Accelerators was back in December: while these virtual Accelerator events are currently held monthly, the Hyperion team needed some time to integrate the feedback from that event, so this was really only the second opportunity to focus on this new capability. I was a little busy last week (mainly with attending and speaking at the AI in AEC 2021 conference, which I found very interesting), so I... Read more →

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 →