Through the Interface

Building the 5m Dar Smart Bridge

Now that my head is briefly back above water following Autodesk University 2022 and some time off with the family, I thought I’d revisit the Dar 5m Smart Bridge project to share some of the things I learned about it during AU in New Orleans. As a reminder, I was not heavily involved in the building of the bridge itself – although I did track it with great interest from a distance – as my role really only came into play in the final stages of the project, when we were looking to get the data from the bridge... Read more →

Come and see the 5m Dar Smart Bridge at Autodesk University 2022

In a recent post I hinted at a really impressive project that is being unveiled today in the exhibit hall of AU 2022. (My involvement was as usual pretty minor, primarily relating to data visualization, while the really impressive work was around designing and printing it.) The project is a 5 metre long single-cantilevered (in terms of the printing – it’s supported at both ends when in use) smart bridge, 3D-printed from recycled PETG and glass fibre in our Boston Technology Center for Dar. Here’s a video shared via LinkedIn that describes the project and a photo of Steve... Read more →

Human-centric building design

In a recent post, I mentioned that I’ve been asked to help lead our efforts in a particular area of research. I was deliberately vague at the time. Now, with Autodesk University 2022 around the corner, it seems a good time to say more about this. I hope it stimulates some interesting discussions at the event. As a company, one of Autodesk’s core interests is to enable the design and creation of healthier, safer, more resilient spaces. We want to explore tools for designers and architects that help them create buildings with more attention to the occupants. In the... Read more →

Exciting updates on Tandem & seeing them at AU

If you didn’t get the chance to watch last week’s webinar by the Autodesk Tandem team – their September 2022 webinar – then I highly recommend checking out the recording, especially if you’re interested in updates to their work on displaying sensor data. If you liked Project Dasher, you’re going to love the work that’s being done in Tandem. :-) Questions were asked during the webinar about attendees’ interests regarding workflows for heatmaps: If you missed the chance to vote – but have strong opinions on these workflows and would like to provide detailed feedback – then you can... Read more →

Counting down to AU 2022

There’s now just a month to go before many will be travelling to New Orleans for the first in-person Autodesk University since 2019. Aside from being back at event with 10,000 or so attendees – something many of us may well have forgotten how to do, including myself – this year’s event will be different from those in recent years as it’s being held somewhere other than Las Vegas. In Vegas it’s possible to have that many people (give or take) hosted along with a full conference – including a significant exhibition space and somewhere to feed the hungry... Read more →

Another look at bundle optimization for Dasher

Back in September I talked a bit about using a plugin for Rollup – the package bundler we use for Project Dasher – to start optimizing the bundling and delivery of JavaScript code. Over the last few days I’ve come back to this topic, as I felt it was time to dig into some issues. Dasher has three primary pages: The index page, where you arrive when you visit the site. The projects dashboard, which you can access if you have login credentials for the site. The Dasher viewer page itself, which most of you will have accessed via... Read more →

The Autodesk Tandem API is now in Beta

If you’ve visited the Tandem website, this week, you may have seen a little footer saying “Unleash the power of digital twins with Tandem APIs | Now in Beta”. This is interesting news for the many (100+, at the last count) developers using Forge to build digital twins. Those using Revit or IFC as a data-source will most probably find the possibility of building on Tandem to be of significant interest. If you click on the “Learn more about APIs” link to the right of the footer, you’ll end up on a page that describes the API and SDK... Read more →

The Forge Data Day in Munich

Today I’ve been in Munich for the inaugural event in the Forge Data Days tour. As I decided to attend at fairly short notice, I didn’t even look into flights: flying from Geneva or Zurich to Munich is expensive at the best of times (considering the distance), and with less than a week of advance notice it would have been ridiculous. So I took the bus, which cost about $20 each way. It’s an hour and half to get to Zurich from my place, and the direct bus to the centre of Munich took another four hours. Not bad,... Read more →

A new book on Innovation in Construction

The Autodesk Construction Cloud team kindly shared a post on LinkedIn, last week, about a project I participated in. There’s a new book from Springer on “Innovation in Construction” for which I contributed a chapter called “Cutting-Edge Practical Research on Generative Design, IoT and Digital Twins”. This chapter weighs in at 29 pages – of an overall 454 for the book – and here’s its abstract: This chapter explores two areas of research undertaken by Autodesk over the last decade and how they both have the potential to impact the construction industry. The first area relates to the Internet... Read more →

The Autodesk Gallery opening and the 2m Dar Smart Bridge at DCW 2022

A few events have happened over the last few weeks that I would have loved to have attended, had I had the energy (and been in better shape). The first was the grand opening of the Autodesk Gallery on May 11th. I received an invite – because of my participation in the NEST project – but as I was planning on actually being at the NEST building that day I declined. And I ended up being home with Covid, so there’s that. The gallery was opened by SF Mayor London Breed. Here’s a snap of Andrew Anagnost showing the... Read more →

Smarter Bridges Conference 2022

On Sunday I flew back across from Zurich to Schipol for a small, 2-day conference attended by various stakeholders in the MX3D smartbridge project. Very confusingly there were two flights leaving for Amsterdam at exactly the same time – 17h35 – so I very nearly ended up at the wrong gate. Luckily I realised in time. On arriving at Schipol I took the train to Amsterdam Centraal, where I saw an overnight train back to Switzerland was about to leave. (I had tried hard to find a space on this train to come across for the conference, but it... Read more →

The NEST building’s HiLo roof

This week I was supposed to be back in Zurich for a couple of days, visiting the NEST building on Tuesday and the ETH campus on Wednesday. As it was, though, I managed to pick up Covid at last week’s TechX event in Atlanta, so I ended up staying at home feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t had particularly bad symptoms, thankfully: neither headaches nor fever, just mainly a heavy cough and a bit of brain fog, both of which are thankfully clearing up now. Given the value of last week’s event I’d certainly say that getting it relatively... Read more →

Working around the Chrome bug affecting the timeline

The amazing Mike Lee – who has been doing a great job of driving the timeline project for Dasher – has used his sleuthing skills to figure out a way around the bug affecting Intel-based Macs running Chrome v100 on Monterey. He was about to submit a bug when he discovered this ticket filed against Chromium, and a workaround buried within in. (Mike has since gone ahead and submitted his own report tracking this.) You need to go to chrome://flags and disable “Use passthrough command decoder”. After restarting Chrome and launching Dasher, you should now see the timeline is... Read more →

More on Tandem and Dasher

This week we’ve updated the Project Dasher site with a new build – the first update we’ve made in nearly a year. (I’ve talked about some of the rewrite work in a previous post, but it’s taken a while to get around to making it all available.) One of the major improvements has been with the timeline component. At some point in the future I’ll spend some time talking more about the timeline’s features – it’s available publicly via NPM and is integrated into the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization extension reference application – but for now I just wanted... Read more →

Harnessing the Tandem SDK inside Dasher

Back in September we started the work to integrate the (currently still internal) SDK for Autodesk Tandem into Project Dasher. This is what I’ve referred to, in the past, as “Tandem inside Dasher” (as opposed to “Dasher inside Tandem”). The work hasn’t been happening constantly: it’s been intermittent, as changes were needed to both Tandem and the core Forge viewer to support certain workflows. I’m happy to say that, as of this week, the integration is pretty close to having parity with the version based on the traditional Forge viewer, with a few gaps that should be filled in... Read more →

Three AU proposals to vote for and a deadline reminder

It’s the last few days to submit your class proposals for Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans. The Call for Proposals closes on April 15th. I’ve now submitted three classes, myself, and would greatly appreciate you voting for the one(s) you would like to see part of the event. This is whether you intend on being there in-person in New Orleans or not: the vast majority of classes will either be livestreamed or recorded and made available on-demand for virtual attendees. Here they are. Voting is open until April 25th. Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Building Digital Twins... Read more →

BIM World Paris 2022

On Monday I hopped onto the train to Geneva and from there onto the TGV to Paris Gare de Lyon. I was in Paris for BIM World, where we displayed the Dar 2m Smart Bridge. It was my first time seeing the bridge in person, which was a really exciting moment for me. After checking into a very nice little hotel in the 6th arrondissement I headed to the conference centre to help with the setup. The bridge was already unboxed and hooked up when I arrived. Pete Storey had some wires to connect to get it up and... Read more →

Detecting collisions in the Forge viewer

In a recent post we saw that switching to use THREE.BufferGeometry brought some unexpected benefits when it came to rendering robots inside Dasher. I wasn’t very happy about the fact that said robots were spinning destructively on the MX3D bridge, so I started looking into options for collision detection inside a Forge viewer application. From the start I should say that the approach that I ended up choosing is fairly rudimentary in nature: a much better solution would be to integrate a physics engine such as Ammo.js or perhaps even a voxelization engine such as VASA. But I figured... Read more →

Switching to use THREE.BufferGeometry in Forge viewer applications

I talked some time ago about some work that has been needed to be done in Project Dasher – and other Forge viewer clients – in anticipation of supporting viewers such as Tandem’s. In this case it was fairly specifically about the need to support loading of multiple models inside the viewer, rather than working on the assumption that there’s a single model available. For the last few days I’ve been looking at another area that by all accounts will be beneficial, whether driven by use of the Tandem viewer or the upcoming Forge viewer based on the latest... Read more →

Vote on my (and others') AU 2022 class proposals

I’ve gone ahead and submitted two class proposals for Autodesk University 2022. If you think they should be part of this year’s event, I’d certainly appreciate you voting for them: Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Autodesk Research first created the Space Analysis toolkit - and its accompanying Dynamo package - to support 2D generative design workflows such as those used during Project Discover for the architectural layout of Autodesk's Toronto office. VASA - short for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis - takes these techniques to the next level, allowing the geometric exploration of architectural spaces in 3D for activities... Read more →