Through the Interface

An update from Amsterdam

It’s now Thursday night, and tomorrow morning we’ll be heading home from Amsterdam. As with any project, some things haven’t gone quite as smoothly as they might, but more on that in a bit. My son and I proudly donned our MX3D T-shirts for this morning’s pic: Here’s another shot from the bridge itself, looking down the canal. Now for some information about the main issue currently impacting the project. Here’s a video I took while on the bridge, that shows a quick walkover and the canal views. As you can see, there’s an issue with the clearance between... Read more →

First glimpse of the MX3D bridge installed

This morning I headed with our eldest son (he’ll be 17 in just over a week – how did that happen?) to Zurich airport to catch our first flight in what seems like forever to travel to Amsterdam to see the MX3D bridge being installed. Even catching the train was surreal: I’ve certainly done so, during the pandemic, but only for personal trips. My usual habit of grabbing breakfast in the dining car didn’t go so smoothly when I realised I could no longer remember the PIN for my corporate card. Luckily I could go contactless – SBB breakfasts... Read more →

The light at the end of the… smart bridge

This weekend I had a very strange task to perform: I had to book travel for work. Remembering how our corporate travel system worked was just one hurdle to cross – beyond that I had to deal with getting the appropriate management and travel department approvals, along with the fact I’ve booked a separate ticket for my 16-year old son to come along, and wanted to be 100% sure that we’re on the same flight. Was life really this complicated pre-pandemic? I’m sure I’ll get used to it all again, before long. The reason I’m travelling is pretty exciting,... Read more →

Applying heatmap power to single-sensor volumes

I’ve been heads-down on a side project to integrate a C++ library into Forge using Web Assembly (hopefully I’ll share more on this sometime soon). Thankfully while I’ve been busy on that, the Hyperion team has been beavering away on some changes to their core shader. Last week I realised – now that we have controls to adjust the confidence and power settings in the shader – that rooms with just one sensor have a uniform shading style. This was a deliberate choice we made, back when we initially implemented the shader, as we felt it would help highlight... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 2

In the first post in this series we looked at how a heatmap can be used to shade an object using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension – or Project Hyperion. In our case we shaded the surface of the MX3D bridge. In this post we look at a slightly different use-case for this mechanism, where we want to shade a piece of geometry inside the model based on the value of a particular sensor. To be clear: this is about shading the entire object a uniform colour that varies based on the value of the sensor that’s providing... Read more →

Setting the vertical position of planar heatmaps

In a recent post we talked about the integration of Hyperion’s planar heatmap capability into Dasher. Towards the end of that post, I mentioned that the Hyperion team was looking into exposing some way to place planar heatmaps not only at the minimum and maximum vertical locations in the bounding box, but at levels in-between. The team has delivered this more quickly than I expected, and you’ll be able to try it for yourselves in v7.45 of the Forge viewer. While I was adding the sliders needed for the capabilities shown in the last post, I went ahead and... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 1

Over the next few posts – in this series, anyway – we’re going to take a look at the shading of objects (actually meshes) using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (Project Hyperion). This is something we’ve done in Dasher for some time, and I was excited that using Hyperion would once again allow us not only to rip out some of our old code but also to go in new directions and explore interesting new capabilities. Let’s first explain how this type of shading differs from what we’ve seen in previous posts, namely volumetric room and planar shading:... Read more →

Autodesk University 2021 will be in early October

The big news of the last week or so – although I’m well behind the curve, given prior announcements by the AU and Forge teams – is that the dates for Autodesk University 2021 have been fixed, and announced along with the event’s pricing. As anticipated from the somewhat early CFP process, this year’s AU will be held in early October. It wasn’t so long ago that AU was in December, so this is a significant shift for many – and will mean that speakers are likely to have to spend some time this summer getting their material together,... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion's planar heatmaps into Dasher

Having spent time recently looking at integrating sprites and volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher, today we move on to a capability that we didn’t have previously but has been enabled by Project Hyperion (i.e. the new Data Visualization Extension for the Forge viewer): planar heatmaps. Planar heatmaps do just what you’d expect: they display a heatmap for 3D geometry in a plane. This means you can display a heatmap on the floor or ceiling of rooms, or place them on tables or work surfaces. They might – for instance – be used to indicate usage of an area, such... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher – Part 2

I was thinking back on last week’s post regarding the work needed to integrate Hyperion’s volumetric heatmaps into Dasher, and realised that – despite the relative length of the post – I’d really glossed over the process for integrating heatmaps and using them to display sensor data. So I’ve retroactively gone back and marked that post as “Part 1”, with this post being “Part 2”. That’s not to say the process is especially complicated, but I felt it was a bit of a cop out to say “just follow the documentation”, as there was a little more to it... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion's volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher – Part 1

Today’s post is a follow-on from the first part where we looked at integrating Hyperion sprites into Dasher. (The posts are independent, though, so you don’t have to read the first one if you’re only interested in integrating heatmaps.) I was supposed to publish this at the beginning of the week, but I ended up getting bogged down by a couple of urgent projects – both of which I’m happy to say have led to me making some interesting enhancements to Dasher, which is, at least, something. Anyway, the topic I wanted to share is the approach for integrating... Read more →

It’s officially available: Data Visualization Extension for the Forge Viewer

The big news from this week (for me, anyway, aside from a very enjoyable Star Wars Day, yesterday) is that Project Hyperion has been released officially to the public as the Forge Viewer’s Data Visualization Extension. All you need to do is to use it is to start making use of the Forge Viewer from v7.42 (it is available in earlier versions, but this is the most complete version) and then take a look at the extensive online documentation. Congratulations to the Hyperion team for this major milestone! The work that has been done by that team to engineer... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion sprites into Dasher

As mentioned on Monday, I’ve been having lots of fun getting Hyperion to work inside Dasher, this week. All good preparation for the AU class I hope will be accepted for this year’s conference. Right now I have sprites working, which is an important first step (and doesn’t actually involve any of the more gnarly, data-related issues I expect to have when w tackle surface shading/heatmaps). In this post we’re going to step through the main steps taken to make this happen, but also to describe some of the important changes that were needed to make it all work... Read more →

My AU 2021 class proposal on integrating Hyperion with Dasher

On Friday I went ahead and submitted my one and only class proposal for the all-digital Autodesk University 2021. Let’s hope it gets selected. In case you’re interested, here’s the content of the proposal: Title: Dasher and Hyperion: using Data Visualization in a Forge viewer application Class ID: SD500020 Product(s): Forge Topics: Building Information Modeling (BIM), Building Operations, Internet of Things (IoT), Software Development Session Description Autodesk Research started Project Dasher in 2009 to explore the possibilities around integrating IoT data with BIM. In 2016 it was ported to work on the Forge platform, to understand the feasibility and... Read more →

Come work on Hyperion to help drive Data Visualization with Forge

The Forge viewer team is seeking to hire a San Francisco-based Senior Product Owner for Project Hyperion, the technology being made available as the Data Visualization Extension. (If you’re not familiar with the term Product Owner then in fairness you’re probably not a good fit for this position – the successful candidate will have PO experience – but here’s a link that may be of interest to you if you want to understand more about what’s involved.) This team is part of our Engineering organisation, but there are certainly connections to the work we’re doing over in Research: they... Read more →

Forge Viewer Data Visualization Extension now in public Beta

Last week Autodesk’s Developer Advocacy and Support team organised their second Forge Accelerator where developers could prototype Digital Twins using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (codenamed Hyperion). The first of these Accelerators was back in December: while these virtual Accelerator events are currently held monthly, the Hyperion team needed some time to integrate the feedback from that event, so this was really only the second opportunity to focus on this new capability. I was a little busy last week (mainly with attending and speaking at the AI in AEC 2021 conference, which I found very interesting), so I... Read more →

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 →