Through the Interface

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 →

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 →

’Tis the season to build Dasher

During the last week the kids have been opening their Advent calendars, we had a visit from St. Nicholas (I’ve talked before about this central European tradition), and the Candy Cane accelerator has kicked off. All-in-all things are starting to feel very festive! (And yes, Dasher is one of Santa’s reindeer, so there’s that, too.) The accelerator has upwards of 30 companies and academic partners in attendance, with 5 or so of these focused on “building their own Dasher” using the upcoming Data Visualization Extension for the Forge viewer (Project Hyperion). Yesterday I presented a session on Project Dasher... Read more →

The Digital World: BIM

Tomorrow (or today for some of you) marks the start of a 3-day event – the Built Environment Summit – being run by BSI in the UK. Here’s the agenda for Day 1 (December 1st 2020, all times UTC/GMT): 09:00 - 09:10 Chairman's Opening Remarks 09:10 - 10:30 DFMA and IoT: What are the possibilities? 10:30 - 10:50 Morning Break 10:50 - 12:00 Build-by-wire: the future 12:00 - 13:00 Asset Performance Management: Who benefits? What could we expect? 13:00 - 13:30 Lunch Break [13:30 - 15:45 Product Data and Standardization] 13:30 - 13:50 Construction Innovation Hub and LEXiCON 13:50... Read more →

Build Your Own Dasher during the upcoming Forge Accelerator

Forge Accelerators have always been BYOD. First they were “Bring Your Own Device”, then (on going virtual) they were also “Bring Your Own Drinks” and now for the upcoming event – on December 7-11 2020 – we’re giving people the opportunity to “Build Your Own Dasher”. BYOD3! Attendees at the Candy Cane accelerator (love those codenames) will get early access to to the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension – and the source code for the reference application that shows how to use it – which will greatly simplify the process of building a Digital Twin using Forge. (Something that... Read more →

My AU 2020 class Q&A

Yesterday evening was the Q&A for my Autodesk University 2020 class, Lessons from Project Dasher: Building a Digital Twin Using Forge. People registered for AU you can use the above link to access the recording for the next 30 days. Just click on the Join Now button: I really wasn’t sure what to expect from this session – having a full hour dedicated to questions! – but I think it went OK. There were a few speedbumps: the assigned moderator for my class was busy elsewhere and so only arrived partway through. It’s AU week, so I understood, and... Read more →

Autodesk Tandem and the Forge Viewer Data Visualization Extension

Yesterday was a great day for people interested in Digital Twins (among lots of other topics, of course). During the AU 2020 General Session and the AEC Keynote we heard about Autodesk Tandem, a new product and platform for creating Digital Twins from BIM. During the Forge Keynote, we heard about the Forge viewer’s new Data Visualization Extension, which simplifies the mapping of (for instance) sensor data into the viewer. I’ve had lots of questions already about how these announcements relate to Project Dasher and the work we’ve been doing in Autodesk Research. Some of these are covered in... Read more →

Fancy a chat during AU 2020?

And so it begins: today is the first day of Autodesk University 2020 (at least in the US), to be enjoyed (most probably) from the comfort of your home office or living room. We are now at well over 100,000 registrations, which is simply unbelievable. Many on Twitter are lamenting (or more likely relishing) the fact they’re not travelling to Las Vegas, dealing with jetlag, dehydration, cracked lips (viva los chapstick), lack of daylight (not good when dealing with the aforementioned jetlag), passive smoke inhalation, slot machine noise pollution and, yes, alcohol poisoning. I do miss the in-person contact... Read more →

Participate in Research at AU 2020

At our in-person Autodesk University events, it’s common for our R&D teams to interview customers and to brief them on ongoing research projects and upcoming product features. This is a really valuable part of our R&D process: this feedback helps us make sure that our products and services help the industry move forward by addressing real customer pain. This year is a bit different, of course: rather than hanging around the Idea Exchange – which I know many of us struggle to find time for – you can sign up for sessions via the AU website (or the links... Read more →

Build your AU 2020 schedule today

It’s time: the full, interactive schedule for this year’s all-digital Autodesk University is now online. You can go ahead and start bookmarking your favourite classes today. Assuming you’re one of the 85,000 (and counting!) people who have registered for the event. If you haven’t already registered, don’t worry: you can still do so for free. (There are still plenty of tickets left. ;-) So to get things rolling, here’s a link to my AU 2020 class for you to bookmark and watch from November 17th. You can expect some interesting news to be announced (or at least repeated) in... Read more →

Halloween and 3D skeletons

This year’s Halloween was destined to disappoint: we’d held out some hope until the 30th that the kids (which just means our youngest, at this point) would end up being able to go trick-or-treating in our village. Understandably – but disappointingly – the announcement came that any kind of trick-or-treating was off the cards for this Halloween. Stricter rules about groups of people were also announced, but with effect from today. From today onwards any kind of public or private event can have a maximum of 5 people present. Given the acceleration of cases in Switzerland, this is completely... Read more →

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 →