Through the Interface

Building the 2m Dar Smart Bridge

Colleagues in Autodesk Research have been working with Dar Al-Handasah on a project to 3D print a series of footbridges with integrated sensors. It’s similar in some ways to MX3D’s Smart Bridge Amsterdam, but printing with plastic rather than steel. I’ve talked about the bridge at a couple of events, now, so I thought it was time to share some more information about this fascinating project. My role in the project is, once again, fairly minor: I’ve been helping with the visualization of sensor data from the bridge inside Dasher (more on that later on), but it’s been fun... Read more →

The NEST exhibit at the new Autodesk Gallery

Last week this announcement was made that included a video showing off the sparkling new Autodesk Gallery at our 1 Market Street office in San Francisco. There’s a lot of inspiring content in the new Gallery – for instance it showcases the results of Autodesk Research’s collaboration with NASA JPL, the generatively designed interplanetary lander, and the scanning robot from Forge partner Scaled Robotics – but I wanted to highlight a project that I’ve participated in quite a bit, over the years, and I’m super-happy to see has a place in the stunning new Gallery: there’s a scale model... Read more →

The recording of last week's BIM Fórum Brasil event

Our friends at BIM Fórum Brasil have now posted the recording of last week’s event on Digital Twins. (If the last link says "We Couldn't Find This Page", just click on the Brazilian flag in the page header.) A big chunk of the session is in Portuguese, but my piece was in English. If you only understand English, I suggest skipping forward to the 20-minute mark. If you’ve heard me talk about this topic before, you might still want to check out the section on the Dar Smart Bridge project at the 35-minute mark. (Be ready to crank up... Read more →

Speaking at tomorrow’s BIM Fórum Brasil about Digital Twins

I’ve been asked to talk about our work on Digital Twins (or Gêmeos Digitais) at the BIM Fórum Brasil event, on Wednesday of this week (January 26th, 2022). The event starts at 10am in Brasilia, which is 2pm in Central Europe, so the timing should work well for Asia, Europe and early birds on the east coast of North America, too. I’ll be sharing information on our older projects, as usual, but I’m also planning to showcase some of our more recent (previously unseen) projects. So there’s likely to be new information even for people who have seen me... Read more →

Draping temperature data from a thermal image across the Forge viewer scene - Part 2

In the last post we looked at how it’s possible to take temperature data from a thermal image and use the Data Visualization Extension to connect that information to locations in a 3D Forge viewer scene. In this post we look at how we can use the events from the same extension to display a simple tooltip showing the temperature when one of these locations is hovered over. Let’s start by looking at what we get from the thermal image. It’s pretty simple: we have colour. As we’re averaging a number of pixels it’s likely to be on a... Read more →

Draping temperature data from a thermal image across the Forge viewer scene - Part 1

I work in the Research Engineering team at Autodesk, a centralised pool of software engineering talent that contributes to research projects across our various industries. Organising this way allows us to explore commonalities (and efficiencies) that would otherwise be hard to achieve. Every year or two we have an internal “Innovation Days” event, which is essentially an internal team hackathon. (Lots of other teams at Autodesk do this, of course, we’re far from being unique in that regard.) Our latest Innovation Days took place on Thursday and Friday of last week, with the theme of sustainability. I met with... Read more →

Come work at Autodesk on the Tandem team!

Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R13688 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 I’m really happy to see that the Tandem team is hiring. And they’re hiring into a really varied set of roles, so hopefully there’s something in this list for everyone. :-) Customer Adoption Specialist Principal Software Developer Senior Software Developer UX Designer Senior UX Designer Technical Program Manager I’m pretty sure that all these positions are “remote-ready”, although I believe from a timezone perspective the Eastern US is strongly preferred for at least the engineering-centric roles. I may have that wrong, of course, and I’ll be sure to come back and... Read more →

Frustrated by travel restrictions? Join the last virtual Forge Accelerator of 2021!

The subject is basically a perfect description of my own situation, today, but I thought there might be others out there in the same boat (as it were). I have a feeling that more people will end up being stuck at home over the next few weeks, whether they like it or not. From my side I was very much looking forward to a trip to the UK, next week, where I’d have had the chance to catch up with my UK colleagues for the first time in-person in probably 2 years. And to join for the team Christmas... Read more →

An interview and an anniversary

Recently Mayur Mistry from Engineering ArchiTECHure asked me to join him for a YouTube livestream. Mayur often holds his interviews over the weekend, but he very kindly accommodated my schedule and held the session during the week. So while it was “live”, it wasn’t at the usual time for Mayur’s subscribers and the discussion remained very much between the two of us. I’ve seen some really good sessions on his channel – several of his guests have prepared extensive material to show – so my apologies if you’re expecting something more formal: we just chatted for an hour. Many... Read more →

Want to see Dasher inside Tandem? Tell us what you need.

The Autodesk Tandem team has just launched their Customer Research Program. This is the perfect way to engage with the Tandem team and let them know what features you might need from your future digital twin infrastructure. In particular, if you’re interested in seeing features from Project Dasher show up inside Tandem – via what I referred to in a recent post as “Dasher inside Tandem” – then this is your chance to be heard. Related to this topic, I came across a funny meme recently on Twitter. I couldn’t find it again, so here’s my attempt at reproducing... Read more →

Getting ready for Tandem: a call to action for Forge developers

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time exploring how Project Dasher might make use of the platform capabilities of Autodesk Tandem. This is just one effort connecting the two projects, and the one I tend to think of as “Tandem inside Dasher”: the Tandem team is looking what makes sense in terms of “Dasher inside Tandem” (i.e. which Dasher features it makes sense to surface in Tandem for their customers). As I’ve hopefully said before, Autodesk Tandem fills a really important gap in the process to build out a model-centric digital twin: Project Dasher project was never intended... Read more →

Forge and digital twins at Autodesk University 2021

I’ve finally found the time to view the main information from the recent Autodesk University event, and thought it worth highlighting what I consider to be some of the “big ticket” items, especially from my own – somewhat Forge- and digital twin-centric – perspective. First-up, Forge was everywhere in the keynotes. If it wasn’t previously clear that Autodesk is serious about becoming a platform company, it should be from the messaging at this AU. On a side note, there are a number of internal organisational changes that have happened/are happening at Autodesk to accelerate this shift, so I’m currently... Read more →

Bundle optimization in Project Dasher

I mentioned recently that I’ve been working on updating Project Dasher’s use of 3rd party components, and that I had some learnings to share. We started the Forge-based version of Dasher in 2016, and (much to my shame) some of the components had stayed at more-or-less the version available at that time, largely due to the migration effort needed to deal with breaking changes. Biting the bullet to upgrade them was painful but necessary, and right now I (and Dasher) feel nicely refreshed. Last time I mentioned there were two big outstanding dependencies that still required attention: Bootstrap and... Read more →

Build your first Digital Twin at the upcoming Forge Hackathon

Other that my regular foolings-around with ancient tech, I feel like I’ve been neglecting this blog in recent weeks. That’s all about to change, though, as we enter the busy period leading up to Autodesk University 2021. For one I have some interesting learnings I thought I’d share from some of the foundational work I’ve been doing on Dasher’s codebase, but there are also some interesting updates for people performing analyses of 2D (and 3D!) spaces. Fun stuff! First though, it’s worth reminding people of the Forge Hackathon that’s around the corner. It starts in just a couple of... Read more →

A minor makeover – and a lot of core work – for Dasher

Over the last week I’ve been heads-down on core Dasher work, but with very little visible result. Here’s why. Early last week I received an email telling me that it was time to dig into Dasher’s use of 3rd party components and make sure there weren’t any security issues. (This isn’t something unusual – all our products go through this, and many of our research projects, too.) As anyone working on web development projects will know, it’s important to go through from time to time to reduce the technical debt that accumulates due to the use of old libraries... Read more →

A new face in the Autodesk Tandem team

My friend and colleague Hali Larsen has joined the Autodesk Tandem team as a Product Manager focused on connected workflows and sustainability. This is huge news, for lots of reasons: for several years Hali played an absolutely instrumental role in Project Dasher – in many ways she was our de facto PM, but also worked through many gnarly issues related to bespoke configuration for various Dasher pilot projects. Hali has a wealth of experience working with customers in this space, and also knows where most of Dasher’s skeletons are buried, so she is the right person to take on... Read more →

Previewing and viewing PDFs inside Dasher

A couple of days ago we were looking for the datasheets for the various sensors installed in the MX3D bridge: as you’ve probably already read, there are nearly a hundred sensors in and on the bridge, although of only about eight different model types. My colleague Josh Cameron said, in passing, “it would be really handy to have these datasheets integrated into Dasher!”. As usual, this sent me down a rather fun rabbit-hole for a day or so, to see how we might reasonably integrate these PDFs into Dasher. Firstly it’s worth pointing out that these days the Forge... Read more →

Using the Forge viewer? It’s time to switch to SVF2!

The big news on the Forge side of things over the last few weeks is probably the official release of SVF2. This is a more efficient streaming format the Forge viewer (from v7.25 onwards) can consume. We’ve been using SVF2 (which was previously known as OTG) for the last couple of years inside Project Dasher, and it’s been brilliant. If you’re interested in the technical details on SVF2, be sure to check the blog post that announced the SVF2 Beta from late last year. Just for instance, we’ve seen significant performance improvements from using SVF2 for our public demo... Read more →

Data from the MX3D smart bridge

The MX3D team first showed the smart bridge to the public back in October 2018 at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. I was there with the team to finish and test features such as realtime display of skeletons detected using computer vision. Here’s a reminder of how that went: An interesting aspect of the public’s response to the bridge at DDW2018 was that it had broad appeal to people but that people appreciated different aspects of the project: The majority view: “wow, what a cool-looking bridge!” Those who dug a little deeper: “it was 3D-printed by robots? Interesting –... Read more →

The MX3D bridge opens to the public

On Wednesday afternoon I headed back across to Zurich airport for my second trip to Amsterdam in as many weeks. This time I was flying with Swiss rather than KLM, and ended up checking in and boarding through an area of the airport I didn’t recognise at all. Whether this was because it had been so long since I’d been there or due to some deep refurbishment being completed during the pandemic remains to be seen. By the time I arrived in Amsterdam, things had progressed significantly with the MX3D bridge. Here’s a fun staged photo by Thijs Wolzak... Read more →