Through the Interface

Swissbau 2024

On Monday afternoon I received a message from my friend Sven Amiet asking whether I'd be going to Swissbau 2024. I had some sense it was happening this year (it happens every other one), but I hadn't realised it was this week already. In any case I checked my meeting schedule - and found that I didn't have anything important - and decided to head across to Basel on Tuesday morning. It’s always impressive to arrive at Basel’s Messeplatz by tram. The last time I’d been here was for Swissbau 2020 (I skipped the one held 2 years ago).... Read more →

The public demo of Project Dasher is going offline

This milestone has crept up on me, over the last few months. I guess I’ve been putting off thinking – and blogging – about it. Earlier this year we made the decision to wind down development and support of the time-series database that serves as the back-end for Project Dasher. (Fun fact: this project was originally codenamed Blitzen – the name of a reindeer that was part of the “back-end” for Dasher on Santa’s sleigh – and eventually became known internally as Data 360.) Anyway, it was time to wind it down, both because of the widespread availability of... Read more →

Visiting the MX3D bridge in Amsterdam and playing football in Munich

After a really interesting few days in Delft at CAAD Futures 2023, on Friday morning my daughter and I headed to Amsterdam on our way to Munich. The main goal of visiting Amsterdam was – of course – to visit the MX3D bridge, particularly as it’s due to be decommissioned later this year. (I know, I know: it doesn’t seem as though the bridge has been there long, but the permit was a limited one – appropriate for a temporary art installation – and there seems to have been some resistance to the project from a local heritage preservation... Read more →

Checking whether your class proposals have been accepted for Autodesk University 2023

Just a quick note to say that you can now log in to the Autodesk University website (this guidance has changed, please see below) from today – June 23rd – to see the status of your class proposals and learn whether or not they were accepted for AU 2023 in Las Vegas. I was very happy to learn that the two proposals I submitted this year were accepted: I’m sure there’ll be an email sent very shortly, but I just thought I’d share this in case anyone’s impatient to find out their situation relative to classes at this year’s... Read more →

CAAD Futures 2023 at TU Delft from July 5-7

For the last few years I’ve been on the scientific committee for a conference called CAAD Futures. My involvement began with the 2021 edition of the conference: I reviewed several papers submitted to the conference and also ended up being invited to talk during one of the conference’s workshops (it was called Beyond generative Computer Aided-Architectural/Urban Design (CAAD/CAUD) and was hosted by Todor Stojanovski). That last edition was held in Los Angeles – and the workshop hosted in Stockholm – but I only participated remotely. This year’s edition is being held in Europe, at TU Delft in the Netherlands,... Read more →

Streams are live in Autodesk Tandem!

Today is a big day for Autodesk Research – and the Dasher team, in particular – in that the path started back in 2009 has now led to Autodesk Tandem integrating core IoT-centric capabilities in their production digital twin offering. Congratulations to my old Dasher colleague, Hali Larsen, and the rest of the Tandem team! This is all really exciting. :-) (For more information about the historical connection between Dasher and Tandem, this post from back in January might be helpful.) But anyway – today is all about Tandem. The feature is looking really good, presumably at least partly... Read more →

The APS Sustainability Accelerator in Copenhagen

On Sunday night I headed to Geneva airport to take a late flight to Copenhagen for a special Sustainability-focused APS Accelerator. I knew something was up with my flight when at 7:49pm the gate information that was promised to be shown at 7:25pm still wasn’t posted. (This is Switzerland. Something was badly wrong with this scenario.) It turns out the inbound flight from Nice was delayed by an hour, which meant our flight to Copenhagen would arrive at midnight rather than 11pm. Walking through Copenhagen’s beautiful airport at that time of night was highly surreal. It was completely deserted.... Read more →

A student design challenge: Make It Bridge

Over on Instructables there’s a student design challenge featuring the 5m Dar Smart Bridge. It’s called “Make It Bridge”, and the idea is that contestants – who have to be students aged between 13 and 21 and based in the USA or Canada (excluding Quebec, for some reason) – can place the geometry of the Dar bridge, or another bridge of their choosing, in surroundings to which it adds value. It sounds like a lot of fun. I like the guidance given: In choosing the site for the bridge, you might consider what it would look like from below... Read more →

Facility Monitoring beta in Autodesk Tandem

Some huge news was dropped by the Autodesk Tandem team, last week. Their Facility Monitoring feature is now available to Tandem customers as a Beta release. This is effectively the culmination of more than a decade of our research into contextualising sensor (IoT) data inside 3D (mainly BIM) environments. It started through Project Dasher in late 2009, which – passing by our work on Dasher 360 from 2016 – led to the creation of the APS (formerly Forge) viewer’s Data Visualization Extension in 2020-21. In this latest phase, Dasher has inspired the Tandem team to build out Dasher-like features... Read more →

Opportunities in the Tandem team

If you’re looking to join Autodesk to work on our platform for building digital twins, then the Tandem team has a number of openings that may be of interest to you. Product Managers – or wannabe PMs – should check out this North America-based posting. For people more interested in Customer Success positions, there’s a Europe-based CSM role posted. One more role that’s of particular interest to me, at least, is for a Boston-based Developer Advocate. In terms of progress with the Tandem product, I recommend checking out this recent article in AEC Magazine by Martyn Day. Although I... Read more →

In Dublin for the APS Accelerator

On Wednesday I came across to Dublin for the latter part of the APS Accelerator being held, here. Jaime Rosales – who has been here with Sergio Leone and Adam Nagy from the APS Developer Advocacy and Support team – has taken some lovely pictures during this trip. The better ones in this post were taken by him. I unfortunately just missed Peter Schlipf – who was here for the first half of the week – which was a great shame. Here are some pictures of the city. We were mostly staying in the Hilton Garden Inn, so to... Read more →

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 →