Through the Interface

Project Memento now available on Autodesk Labs

Once again I’m a bit late announcing this one: I had friends visiting from the UK, last week, and so took the week off (although I ended finding a fair amount of time to study linear algebra, which was surprisingly fun). I’d queued up the week’s blog posts in advance to reduce the chance of people noticing my absence. ;-) I first heard about Project Memento when I visited Singapore a few months ago (I predicted in that blog post that I’d be writing about this project the day it was live on Labs, but unfortunately that clearly didn’t... Read more →

Money designed with AutoCAD

I'm currently in Boston for an internal technical summit where I'll be presenting sessions on Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion (which will the sessions I've submitted - and will hopefully get accepted - for AU 2013). I arrived a day early and rented a bicycle from the hotel, taking the opportunity to cycle through the MIT and Harvard campuses (both of which are in Cambridge, where the summit is taking place) and then on to downtown Boston. It was really great being back in Boston after probably five years - it's still one of my favourite cities in the... Read more →

Kinect for Xbox One

Another great week for tech. I’m in hog heaven reading all the information being shared regarding the newly-revealed Xbox One. I’m obviously most interested in the upgrade to the Kinect technology. Here’s what I’ve gleaned, thus far: Full HD with 1080p resolution Use of something called “Active IR”, a type of time-of-flight depth detection rather than relying on structured light, allowing accurate depth data even in the dark Enhanced skeleton tracking, with muscular stress and joint orientation down to the finger level Heart rate estimation, presumably using something akin to the Eulerian video magnification that made such a splash... Read more →

Call for proposals: Autodesk University 2013

I arrived back safely in Switzerland on Saturday night. It was a pretty good trip to the Bay Area, this time: most surprisingly this is the first time ever I’ve managed to sleep through until 6am (or thereabouts) on every single day of a trip to California. But then I – like many people – do find going west to be easier than going east, jetlag-wise. I certainly found that I couldn’t get back to sleep when I woke up at home on Sunday morning at 3am, which made for a very long day (especially as we participated in... Read more →

Kinect Fusion inside AutoCAD

OK, here goes: my first (public) attempt at integrating the brand new Kinect Fusion functionality – made available this week in v1.7 of Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows SDK – into AutoCAD. There are still a few quirks, so I dare say I’ll be posting an update in due course. As mentioned in the last post, I’ve been working on this for some time but can now show it publicly, as the required SDK capabilities have now been published. As part of this effort, I’ve gone ahead and made sure the other Kinect samples I’ve written for AutoCAD work with... Read more →

Kinect Fusion released today!

This is very exciting: v1.7 of the Kinect for Windows SDK is being released today and it includes the uber-cool Kinect Fusion component. For those of you who have not yet heard of Kinect Fusion, it allows you to use your Kinect for Windows sensor as an effective reality capture device: it aggregates input from depth frames provided by the Kinect sensor, mapping out a 3D volume. Or, for the layperson, it allows you to paint a 3D model of an existing real-world object or scene into your computer’s memory. Here’s a video from Engadget’s Expand event, held over... Read more →

Inaugural Zurich .NET Developer meet-up

I headed cross to the Zurich area on Tuesday afternoon – which is quite a trek from where I live, around ~2.5 hours by train – to attend the first Zurich .NET Developer meet-up. The event was held in the Microsoft office in Wallisellen: they kindly provided beer and the meeting room, while the session itself was organised by members of the local .NET community. Considering the weather – a pretty serious snowstorm hit the country that day – the event was surprisingly well attended. The main topic of the session was MVVM Light, a lightweight framework developed by... Read more →

Blinking lights with a Digispark

I talked about some of the fun I’ve been having with Arduino in this previous post. I eventually added a pushbutton and a potentiometer to that particular circuit, modifying the code to watch for a hardware interrupt – to blink the LEDs only when the button is pressed – but also to apply a variable delay to the blinking (speeding it up or slowing it down depending on the direction in which you turn the knob of the potentiometer). I’ve now ordered an edge connector that will fit my ZX Spectrum: my next stage for the Arduino-based work is... Read more →

Updated AutoCAD integration samples for Kinect SDK v1.6

As part of my ongoing procrastination around my AU material development – despite which I’m managing to make some progress… my WinRT stuff is mostly done, now – I went ahead and updated my Kinect samples to use v1.6 of the SDK. The version which finally works from a Windows session inside a Parallels VM on my Mac. Yay! Here is the updated sample project, which includes the face-tracking capabilities shown in this previous post and therefore also requires the Kinect Developer Toolkit. It wasn’t really much effort to port: a couple of methods that map depth and colour... Read more →

Virtually done

Over the weekend, from Friday to Sunday, I spent far more hours than I’d have liked finishing off my AU Virtual class for this year, “Secure Your AutoCAD Environment” (I’m increasingly involved in security-related activities for the AutoCAD development organisation). Preparing material for AU Virtual is often pretty tough, whether it’s being recorded in person (I’ve done a couple of those) or being in advance and needing extensively editing. This year’s format was a bit different, in that it required multiple modules to be recorded separately as opposed to a single, monolithic recording. Better from a consumption perspective, apparently,... Read more →

Waiting for my Raspberry Pi

While I was away on holiday, Scott Sheppard announced an Autodesk-internal competition of which the eight lucky winners would receive a currently-still-hard-to-come-by Raspberry Pi Model B (so named in homage to the computer that helped inspire a generation of British programmers, the BBC Micro). All that contestants had to do was submit an idea for a compelling use of the device (and then submit a video of the completed project, along with instructions to replicate it on Instructables.com). I’d been interested for some time in getting my hands on one of these cool little systems, and had a few... Read more →

Face tracking inside AutoCAD using Kinect

After discovering, earlier in the week, that version 1.5 of the Kinect SDK provides the capability to get a 3D mesh of a tracked face, I couldn’t resist seeing how to bring that into AutoCAD (both inside a jig and as database-resident geometry). I started by checking out the pretty-cool FaceTracking3D sample, which gives you a feel for how Kinect tracks faces, super-imposing an exaggerated, textured mesh on top of your usual face in a WPF dialog: I decided to go for a more minimalist (which also happens to mean it’s simpler and with less scary results :-) approach... Read more →

Integrating Kinect with AutoCAD 2013

As promised in the last post, today we’re going to see the adjusted point cloud import workflow applied to the previously posted Kinect integration samples. This was also an opportunity to look at the improvements in version 1.5 of the Kinect for Windows SDK. When the SDK was announced, my initial reaction was “OK, but what we really need is finger-tracking”, especially as it was right around the time Leap Motion made their big announcement. But there have nonetheless been some really interesting capabilities added to the Kinect SDK with version 1.5: Seated mode skeletal tracking You can choose... Read more →

Indexing point clouds programmatically in AutoCAD 2013

Thanks to RS for raising this issue via a blog comment and to my esteemed colleague, Christer Janson, for suggesting the solution during England’s epic Euro 2012 victory over Sweden on Friday evening (sorry, Christer – I couldn’t help but rub it in just a little ;-). On a slightly more serious note, I find it very painful to watch England play, at the best of times, and while I was happy “we” won, I was sad to see Sweden left with no chance of continuing past the group stage. So it goes. Those of you who have played... Read more →

360 convergence

This is all very exciting: given the recent launch of a number of “360” products by Autodesk – including Autodesk 360, Autodesk PLM 360 and Autodesk BIM 360 – it looks as though we’re about to enter a strategic relationship with Microsoft to make Autodesk products interoperate seamlessly with their industry-leading games platform, the Xbox 360. It’s as yet unclear exactly what this means for the two companies and their respective 360 products, although I’m hopeful that some of the work I’ve been doing to prototype the use of Kinect and Metro with our products is going to be... Read more →

Updated AutoCAD + Kinect for Windows samples

Thanks to some recent coverage on a Channel 9 blog (which I consider a great honour – I’ve been a huge fan of Channel 9 since its inception :-), I decided to get around to posting an update to the AutoCAD + Kinect samples I demonstrated at AU 2011. While attending the recent hackathon, I spent a fair amount of time porting my AutoCAD-Kinect integration samples from the Beta 2 of the Microsoft Kinect SDK (for the Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor) to the released SDK for the Kinect for Windows. It was pretty impressive just how many of... Read more →

Kinect for Windows release date and pricing

As expected, Microsoft has announced at CES 2012 that Kinect for Windows devices will become available from February 1st, priced at $249. Those of you who attended my Kinect class at AU 2011 will probably remember me speculating about the eventual cost for this device, and that it would preferable for Microsoft to recoup more of their technology investment from the physical devices than they had from the equivalent devices for Xbox 360, and therefore avoid developers having to pay Microsoft directly for the use of their SDK. I think I suggested it’d be fine to pay $200 or... Read more →

Inventory: heading home from AU

What a great week! The highlight – and that’s from a lot of great moments – was probably the AutoCAD + Kinect session: the demos were clearly fun to do, but there was a high degree of audience participation and we all laughed a lot. For those who weren’t able to attend in person, I’m going to try to find some time to record the demos and upload them to YouTube. Watch this space. I’m now about to head home to Switzerland. For lots of very good reasons, I’m currently carrying the following electronic devices: MacBook Pro This is... Read more →

A quick AUpdate

So, here we are on Wednesday, day two of AU proper (although my team was busy with ADN-only sessions on Sunday and Monday). Yesterday was really fun: I was part of the “Meet the AutoCAD API Experts” panel (along with Stephen Preston, Albert Szilvasy, Mike Dickason, Bill Adkison, Davis Augustine and Fenton Webb), which is always a good session (and a privilege to spend some time alongside some of the brightest minds in CAD programming). I then had the honour of co-speaking a session on AutoCAD scripting with dave espinosa-aguilar, probably the all-time highest-rated AU speaker. It was really... Read more →

Adding speech recognition to AutoCAD via Kinect (continued)

Ah, the joys of jetlag. After getting up with jetlag at 3am, yesterday, I finally worked out what was wrong with my inconsistently performing speech recognition approach shown in this previous post. I tracked down this helpful piece of advice on the Microsoft forums, which explained that the Kinect Audio capability really needs to be initialized on a MTA (multi-threaded apartment) thread. Moving the relevant initialization to a function marked with the [MTAThread] attribute and then spawning a thread to execute it made all the difference – the code now behaves predictable and effectively. I added a few more... Read more →