Through the Interface

Augmenting Reality in La Chaux de Fonds

I’ve been working with a number of local organisations to help prepare the 25th anniversary party we’re holding for Autodesk Switzerland in October. One of them is Robosphère, an association in La Chaux de Fonds focused on increasing awareness of the field of robotics. When I was there chatting with Serge Bringolf – the chairman of Robosphère– a few weeks ago, I showed Serge the HoloLens demo I’d been working on. It included a robot, after all. This was Serge’s first exposure to mixed reality and he thought it’d be a good topic for a presentation at one of... Read more →

21 years

I was a little surprised when LinkedIn reported my 21st anniversary at Autodesk, a couple of weeks’ ago. I eventually realised it was because the middle of my month of starting had been chosen to notify my connections of this particular anniversary (LinkedIn doesn’t have the specific date, I suppose). Anyway, it turns out today’s the actual anniversary. 21 short years’ ago, I joined Autodesk Ltd. in Guildford, Surrey. Since then I’ve worked for Autodesk Development S.à.r.l. (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), Autodesk India Private Ltd. (Bangalore, India), and Autodesk, Inc. (San Rafael, California). But all within the umbrella of life at... Read more →

ETHZ, EPFL and all that jazz

This week has been a little hectic, once again. Yesterday I spent the morning back across at ETH Zurich, speaking with members of the Block Research Group about Forge, Dynamo and HoloLens. They’ve just moved into a brand new building labelled HIB – where the various schools at ETH focusing on architecture from a technological perspective will be co-located – but as it’s so new it’s yet to be sign-posted. I eventually did find it, but not without asking for directions from 5 different people. Inside the ceiling is pretty cool: they’ve used a combination of skylights for natural... Read more →

My entry for Autodesk’s first Global Hackathon: a HoloLens-based tool for navigating low visibility environments

We have an internal company Hackathon being held at Autodesk locations around the world on September 6th and 7th. The theme for the event is “What’s Next?” and there are variety of sub-themes under which the hacks can fall: Computer as collaborator Future of product interfaces Internet of Things Social good / Sustainability The future of anything else I signed up some time ago to be an “evangelist” for the event, which means I’m a resource for people in the local Neuchatel office should they have questions about VR/AR and IoT (which fall under the second and third sub-themes,... Read more →

Using HoloLens to display diagnostic information for building components

I’ve been looking at using HoloLens for more “serious” applications (yes, beyond dancing robots :-). One simple prototype I’ve worked on over the last few weeks – once again with the help of Tom Eriksson, who did another stellar job transforming the CAD data into a good-looking Unity model – is to show an electrical transformer and allow the user to pinpoint a technical problem inside it for the purposes of (hopefully predictive) maintenance. Here’s a quick demo video, showing a prototype where we open up the electrical transformer and show its insides before scaling and exploding it and... Read more →

Our dancing HoloLens robot, now viewable in Germany

Just out of curiosity, this morning I decided to go and check the YouTube video we saw in the last post. I’d realised from my messing around with the Star Wars opening crawl that if you include copyrighted content in a video, then sometimes ads get included, too, with the proceeds benefiting the copyright owner. Which is absolutely fair enough, as far as I’m concerned. What I hadn’t realised is that some copyrighted content isn’t viewable in certain countries, presumably at the request of the copyright owner. So due to its use of a Chemical Brothers track, my last... Read more →

Making our HoloLens robot dance!

As promised, way back when we started this series of posts looking at various Windows Holographic platform capabilities to build an app that displays an animated ABB industrial robot inside HoloLens, here’s the part where we make it dance. :-) During Autodesk Switzerland’s 25th anniversary party in late October, people will be able to give the app a try and hopefully see the robot dancing along to whatever tunes the DJ plays. Let’s talk a bit about how the system works… Quite early on I decided against doing the additional audio processing directly on the HoloLens device itself. So... Read more →

Adding a context menu command to objects in the Forge Viewer

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time working on our “Dasher 360” prototype, recently. Which is, of course, based on the Forge Viewer. A simple – but handy – feature I added today is to add a context menu item to be displayed when objects are selected – and right-clicked – inside the Viewer. In my case I wanted to prototype a possible workflow for a “Send to HoloLens” capability: the feature itself isn’t ready (that’s what you might call an extreme understatement), but I thought I’d add the menu item in preparation for something being implemented. Here’s... Read more →

Scaling our Unity model in HoloLens

This was a fun piece of functionality and super easy to add. I’d seen a few HoloLens demos where you can scale the model up and down using “bigger” and “smaller” voice commands. There’s even some code in the HoloLens Toolkit that does it. But until I’d actually added it to our robot application, I hadn’t really understood how interesting it was. You can scale a model down and have it sit on your desktop… …or you can scale it up to 10x its realworld size and inspect it in unbelievable close-up mode. From the inside! (Although in fairness... Read more →

Adding spatial sound to our Unity model in HoloLens – Part 3

After the first two parts of this series, where we looked at items 1 & 2 on the below list, it’s time to tackle item 3: A single sound is assigned to our robot When the robot stops completely, so does the sound The same sound is assigned to each of the robot’s parts When each part stops moving, so does the sound for that part A different sound is assigned to each of the robot’s parts When each part stops moving, so does the sound for that part As I mentioned last time, I was fairly happy with... Read more →

Adding spatial sound to our Unity model in HoloLens – Part 2

Last time we looked at a rudimentary – although in some senses complicated – spatial sound implementation for our ABB IRB 6620 industrial robot model inside HoloLens. It was simple because we added a single sound at the root of the robot, and complicated because we then had to track the status of each of the robot’s parts and turn the sound off when all were stopped. In this post we’re going to look at the second of the three design options we saw last time: A single sound is assigned to our robot When the robot stops completely,... Read more →

Adding spatial sound to our Unity model in HoloLens – Part 1

As mentioned last time, upgrading to Windows 10 has opened the door to spatial sound in our HoloLens model. The foundational step is to set our Unity project’s audio settings to have the Spatializer Plugin as the “MS HRTF Spatializer”: if you don’t see this option then you may need to upgrade your OS (as I did). At this point we need to think a little about how best to implement spatial sound in this project, particularly as it literally contains a number of moving parts. I see three main alternatives: A single sound is assigned to our robot... Read more →

Developing for HoloLens on Windows 10

So yes, it does make sense to switch to Windows 10 if you’re doing HoloLens development. As mentioned in a recent post, I’d previously not upgraded any of my work PCs to Windows 10, mainly due to lack of formal support from our IT department. Which isn’t in itself a huge concern, but I do need to connect to certain pieces of corporate infrastructure, so this was enough of a deterrent in the absence of a compelling reason to upgrade. The two main potentially compelling reasons I hit while working on this HoloLens project were: Inability to run the... Read more →

Adding voice commands and spatial mapping to our Unity model in HoloLens

In the last post we added a gaze cursor and some command support for our ABB industrial robot inside HoloLens. The next step I took was to add spatial mapping, allowing the user to select the base of the robot and move it around within the spatially mapped environs. The Holograms 101 tutorial provided very straightforward instructions on how to implement spatial mapping. I once again had to export the “wireframe” material asset from the provided project to get it across into my own, but that was a minor detail. Unfortunately when testing the capability – just as with... Read more →

Adding gaze and gestures to control our Unity model in HoloLens

Now that our industrial robot is animated, I thought it a good time to head back on over and finish more of the Holograms 101 tutorial. The next section of the tutorial focuses on adding a gaze cursor to the application: you have a torus mesh that tracks against the geometry the user is looking at. The instructions were reasonably straightforward – even when retrofitting the approach for a different project – but there were a few “gotchas” that are worth documenting: The simplest way to get the cursor – and its dependent bits and pieces – across into... Read more →

Animating our Unity model for HoloLens

Now that we have our basic model of the ABB 6620 industrial robot inside HoloLens, it’s time to make it move. Tom Eriksson kindly provided some basic scripts to perform rotations on the various parts in the base model. I went ahead and consolidated these into a single “Rotate” script, with parameters (the speed, axis and min/max angles of the rotation) that vary depending on the part being rotated. For instance, some parts can rotate freely around their main axis while others are physically constrained to move between certain angle limits. This is taken care of by the below... Read more →

Displaying your Unity model in 3D using HoloLens

This post shows something really simple, but I decided to share it here as it took me some time to track down. On Saturday I received the 3D model of an ABB industrial robot – the IRB 6620 I mentioned last week – from Tom Eriksson. He’s used a number of tools – including Fusion 360 – to create a gorgeous rendition of this particular robot in Unity. Tom very kindly agreed to share the model, and has spent quite a bit of time helping get it ready for HoloLens. The first version Tom sent unfortunately didn’t work for... Read more →

Usability testing HoloLens

I’m supposed to be off work, this week, so aside from a small amount of HoloLens-related fun, I’ve actually been stuck up a ladder, sanding and painting some of my home’s woodwork. This has left my younger kids (who are now 7 and 9 years old) ample time to stress-test HoloLens, which has led to some fascinating results. I should say that I gave them very little instruction on how to use HoloLens: I showed the air-tap and bloom gestures, but that was about it. I didn’t bother recalibrating the device for little fingers, either. When I finally put... Read more →

My first HoloLens application

After managing to get HoloLens working properly, yesterday I dove right into the Holograms 101 tutorial. There are two versions of this tutorial: the classic 101 is for use with a physical device, while 101E is an alternative for the HoloLens Emulator. In my case I had to use the standard 101 version as I’m currently running a mix of Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on my various PCs and the HoloLens Emulator only works with Windows 10. I could upgrade to Windows 10 – or use it in a Hyper-V VM, I suppose – but as it hasn’t... Read more →

Over my first HoloLens hurdle

It took me longer than expected to get HoloLens working, on Friday night. Here are some thoughts that may or not be of use to others when they go through the same process. The initial tutorial was quite fun. A few parts of it were downright entertaining (I loved the coloured triangles, for instance). Device callibration was straightforward: you go through a few steps where you tell the device more about its position by holding up your finger a few times per eye. Entering any serious amount of text using HoloLens is painful: you need to gaze at each... Read more →