Through the Interface

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 →

AEC and Forge Hackathons

If you enjoy hackathons – and have the time to spare – then you could spend the next month hacking, should you so desire! Last Friday the 2nd online AEC Hackathon kicked off with its lightning round. The event is about now a week in: it started officially on October 5th, but it really only started in earnest with Friday’s kick-off and lightning round. The event will run until October 25th, so you still have time to find or build a team and participate. It was fun listening to the recording of the lightning round – which was short... Read more →

The new Types By Level panel in Project Dasher

Over the last month or so we’ve been focused on the benefits brought to Project Dasher by combining 2D heatmaps with our traditionally 3D view of the world. We started by creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level, before introducing the idea of overlaying building systems information, too. Most recently we took a sneak peek at the topic of today’s post, a new UI that simplifies access to these 2D (and 3D) heatmaps. The idea came up during a team meeting: as we realised we had this combinatorial... Read more →

A sneak peek at Dasher’s new Types By Level UI

This week has been a little crazy in terms of presentations. On Monday it kicked off with an internal project review followed by a presentation to a class of Masters students from the University of Southern California (it was a lunchtime session for them, so it was a late evening one for me). It wrapped up yesterday with the generative design session for the Swiss Data Science Center, which despite a few technical hitches (not on my side, thankfully) seemed to go pretty well. I was told there were upwards of 400 attendees registered for the event, but I... Read more →

Adding building systems to Dasher’s 2D heatmaps

As a recap, so far in this series we’ve looked at creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Project Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level. There are two main tasks left for the completed feature – which will form the core of my upcoming class for AU2020 – which are to add information on building systems and to implement a UI to make these new views easier to access. Today we’re focusing on adding building system information. Let’s first step back and talk about why this is important… One of the key insights we’ve... Read more →

Get the latest information on Project Dasher at this week’s KEA BIM Café Talk

I’ve been invited to talk about Project Dasher at the KEA BIM Café Talk on Wednesday of this week. Many thanks to Aske Strandberg for organising and moderating this event. It’s being held online (of course) at 4pm CET on Wednesday September 16th. The session is primarily targeted at students from KEA – the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology – but guests are very welcome. If you’d like to join, feel free to sign up here. I’ll be sharing a number of really cool enhancements I’ve been making to Dasher during the pandemic-related travel ban – only some... Read more →

Pinning 2D heatmaps per-level in Project Dasher

So far in this series we’ve looked at creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, and then adding lots of them inside Project Dasher. I’ve mentioned a few times – and I’ve seen the same commented via LinkedIn – that viewing data from multiple building floors at the same time would be beneficial. As a reminder, here’s what happens when you change floors with the current implementation: The UX to implement some kind of “pinning” mechanism was non-trivial, but possible. The way I ended up thinking about this was as follows: We still want generic panels that will show data... Read more →

Viewing multiple heatmaps inside Project Dasher

In the last couple of posts in this series, we looked at how we’ve been able to include a 2D heatmap view inside Project Dasher and make it resizable via a square, transparent panel. This post is really just to let you know that we’ve now extended the capability to support multiple heatmaps, which is particularly interesting if you want to compare data from different sensor types across the floor of a building. (I often say that the value in a tool like Dasher is in its ability to correlate multiple streams of data – such as occupancy with... Read more →

Creating a resizable square panel inside the Forge viewer

In this recent post we looked at a new 2D heatmap capability that we’ve added to Project Dasher. In this post we look at what was needed to make this heatmap resizable – but with a fixed aspect ratio – as well as being movable and displayed with a transparent background. Luckily, this previous post shows how to create a transparent, movable window – which we already use to show our surface shading legend – so we were able to use that as a basis for today’s implementation. Firstly, let’s take a look at it working. Note the fact... Read more →

Project Dasher at Kingspan’s IKON building

A nice article was published recently on Redshift regarding Kingspan’s new IKON building. The article focuses particularly on describing how IKON furthers Kingspan’s commitment to innovation and sustainability. In this post I thought we’d look in a bit more detail at how Autodesk Research has been involved in the IKON project, specifically regarding the deployment of sensor and camera technology to help create a digital twin of IKON inside Project Dasher. IKON is Kingspan’s new headquarters and global innovation centre at Kingscourt in County Cavan, Ireland. Here’s an introductory video that talks about this project and shows a couple... Read more →

Displaying a 2D heatmap when surface shading inside Dasher

A week or two ago, I had a meeting with some colleagues to discuss future needs for Project Dasher. One of these requirements related to an exhibit where we’re going to want to ignore all the 3D visualization of sensor data, and focus on the 2D case (I.e. where we shade a 2D floorplan with the sensor values). When this came up I thought to myself “oh, this could be a good driver for us implementing a 2D workflow inside Dasher”, something I’ve chewed on in the past. This time around, I started off thinking about whether to use... Read more →

Exploring minimum and maximum data ranges in Dasher

Last week I posted about how roll-ups in the time-series back-end used by Project Dasher enable some interesting visualization opportunities. When my colleague Hali Larsen saw the post, she made a really interesting suggestion: It would be cool if the user could select whether the heatmap visualizes the Max, Min, or Average of the data for the selected rollup. (Yet another drop down...) The advantage would be that someone looking for a feature in the data would see the "spikes" whereas when you use the rollups as they currently work you lose a lot of the variability of colour... Read more →

Data resolutions in Project Dasher

When we started developing Dasher in late 2009 – back then it had a desktop client – one of the main drivers was around providing an interface to explore IoT data (at the time measuring building performance) responsively in a 3D context. To do this we knew that we needed some way to summarize the raw sensor data at different levels of detail: there was no way we could wait around for the client to query years of sensor data in order to visualize a high-level summary, for instance. In our time-series back-end the team developed a mechanism we... Read more →

The first online AEC Hackathon

Since starting up back in 2013, the AEC Hackathon team has organised 43 in-person events in various cities around the world. This year being “special”, they’ve taken the plunge and set up a couple of online events, the first was held from July 6th-26th while the second will be held from October 9th-25th. I was on holiday for the first two weeks of the July event, so could only really participate by presenting a topic during the final week. Here are a couple of screenshots of me – taken from the session recording, which should still be available on-demand... Read more →

Autodesk Research is hiring experienced software developers and designers!

These days I belong to the Research Engineering team at Autodesk, headed by Tony Ruto. (Tony joined Autodesk with the acquisition of Within Technologies, back at the end of 2014, where he was CTO.) Tony’s team is a shared resource for the various “Core Science” and “Industry Futures” teams within Autodesk Research: we help develop prototypes and platform capabilities that are used elsewhere in the organisation, and also have members of our team embedded within these other teams. The team is growing, which is quite exciting: there are a number of open positions that I’d encourage you to share... Read more →

AEC Hackathon, CanBIM recordings & AU class voting

This post is a bit of a grab-bag of various event-related topics. The first one (chronologically, if not in terms of the title above) is the availability of session recordings from the recent CanBIM event: “The Future of Work: Designing Resiliency and Building Work Safety Post-COVID”. My own session was entitled “Using Generative Design and Digital Twins to Improve Occupant Well Being”. As it was the first session of the day – with a new web streaming platform – there were a few teething issues for the sponsor’s introduction (and the session auto-closed a little too promptly, which meant... Read more →

Attention Digital Twin folks! Autodesk’s Constructwin team is seeking a Product Manager

There’s an exciting job posted for a key role in a new project (product?) team at Autodesk named Constructwin. Here’s some information from the posting: Do you want the opportunity to be part of a startup environment and have a big impact on a brand-new product? Are you looking to be at the forefront of innovative new technology that will ultimately help people imagine, design, and make a better world? If so, come join the Constructwin team at Autodesk! Our mission is to create Digital Twin technology and solutions that will transform how buildings are designed, built, and operated.... Read more →

Give Dasher sharing a try

While I announced the sharing feature – and its corresponding API – some time ago, I still had some work to do before it could go live on the Dasher site: largely around supporting timezones properly when specifying time ranges for data display, but there were some other minor tweaks needed, too. Anyway, the feature is ready enough for people to kick the tyres on it, at least. Here’s a link which will launch the public Dasher demo for you, taking you straight into a “surface shading” view for C02 values on the 1st floor, bringing up the graph... Read more →

Visual clustering is now live in Dasher

I have a quick update to share on Dasher, today: I’ve just pushed live a version to the main Dasher site that enables a core Forge viewer extension to perform visual clustering of model contents. I talked about this back at the beginning of the year, but there was a core change needed to the Forge viewer to make it work for Dasher: specific details are in the blog post I just linked to, but it relates to the fact we rely on the Navisworks format for our models, and these have a different property structure when loaded through... Read more →

Don’t worry – we must have finally reached "peak Kean"

I have the sense that I’m seeing my face too much at the moment (admittedly I’m very attached to it… haha). All I can say, in my defence, is that over the last few weeks I’ve started to receive more requests to participate in virtual activities. And I’ve mostly said yes, as it’s a reasonable alternative to travelling to meet people, given the current circumstances we’re all in. In case you haven’t seen these various pieces of virtual content – and you’re actually interested – here’s a quick round-up of some current and future ones. Getting Simple When my... Read more →