Through the Interface

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 →

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 →

Don’t miss these sessions at the Forge DevCon in Las Vegas

The Forge DevCon is a great place to dive deeply into what’s possible – and what will soon be possible – with the Forge platform. I’m involved in the organisation of the Las Vegas DevCon – being held on November 12-13, 2018 – in that I help lead one of the tracks. When the first DevCon took place, back in 2016, I was track-lead for the AR/VR track… these days I’m co-track-lead with my old friend Cyrille Fauvel for the Complementary Technologies track, which incorporates topics such as AR/VR, AI and robotics. All the really fun stuff, basically. ;-)... Read more →

Adding 3D geometry to a scene in the Forge viewer

In the last post I introduced the series where I’ll be talking about the journey I’ve been going through to add skeletion data inside Dasher 360 (which is, of course, based on the Forge viewer). The first step I took along this path was to find a way to add simple 3D geometry into an existing scene inside the viewer. This is something we do in a limited way inside Dasher – we use point clouds to represent the locations of sensors, for instance – but I wanted to work out the right approach for doing this for data... Read more →

BrickBot – an Autodesk Research project exploring the future of manufacturing

Last month Fast Company published an article about an interesting project Autodesk Research has been working on for a number of years: internally the project was known as LEGOBot, but now that it’s being talked about publicly it has understandably been renamed to BrickBot. BrickBot is a really cool project that’s built on two core ideas: robots are stupid and engineering is expensive. Robots need a lot of help to be told what to do, but telling them what to do is neither straightforward (today) nor flexible: you need to code for specific conditions, and if those conditions change... Read more →