Through the Interface

Reflections on what’s coming in 2023

Today is my first day back after a much-needed 3-week break. For most of that period we were up in the mountains, and split our time between snowboarding and snowshoeing with the puppy. We had some unseasonably mild weather in the Alps, over the break, but we did still manage to make the most of what snow there was. During the course of the break, I spent some time thinking back on 2022 and looking ahead to 2023. For me, 2022 has brought a significant amount of change and uncertainty, between changes in role, escalating climate issues or the... Read more →

AI projects at Autodesk Research

There’s a lot going on with AI at Autodesk, these days: most of our engineering teams have developers who are exploring the potential for AI with respect to product features. For instance, the AutoCAD team has developed and released a number of features driven by machine learning: AutoCAD 2023’s Markup Assist and My Insights features – the latter with its cool Macro Advisor capability – are all powered by ML. I’m less familiar with ML-powered features in Revit and Fusion 360, but I know they have teams focusing on exploring the benefits ML might bring to their users. All... Read more →

Your input on the future of AEC professions

[Firstly, apologies to regular readers who have struggled to load this blog over the last week or so. Typepad has had the mother of all outages, but things seem to be back on track now.] One of my oldest friends, Matt Armitage, lives in Kuala Lumpur and participates in a regular show on a local business-oriented radio station – BFM 89.9 – talking about technology. The show is called Mattsplained (abbreviated to MSP) and I have to admit I’m completely hooked on it (I happen to listen to it via Spotify, but I think it’s on all major podcast... Read more →

AI+X Summit 2022

On Friday I hopped on a train to Zurich to attend the AI+X Summit 2022 event – organised by the ETH AI Center – which was co-located with the ETH Entrepreneur Club’s Launch event. It was a lovely autumn day, and the colours were even on display in Zurich’s Oerlikon district. The event was held at Stage One, an event space a short walk from the Oerlikon train station. I was mainly there for the AI+AEC workshop, but there were a number of mainstage presentations and exhibits by startups and larger companies involved in AI. The workshops were held... Read more →

Human-centric building design

In a recent post, I mentioned that I’ve been asked to help lead our efforts in a particular area of research. I was deliberately vague at the time. Now, with Autodesk University 2022 around the corner, it seems a good time to say more about this. I hope it stimulates some interesting discussions at the event. As a company, one of Autodesk’s core interests is to enable the design and creation of healthier, safer, more resilient spaces. We want to explore tools for designers and architects that help them create buildings with more attention to the occupants. In the... Read more →

Today’s presentations on AI for Urban Resilience

Today (June 22nd, 2022) at 11.00am and 4.00pm (CEST) you can join the final presentations for a very interesting MaCAD (Master in Advanced Computation for Architectural Design) program from IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia). You will be able to join the join the session via the IaaC MaCAD Facebook page. These presentations are the result of a studio on Artificial Intelligence in Architecture, with a particular focus on AI For Urban Resilience. During the studio, led by Angelos Chronis and assisted by Aleksandra Jastrzębska, Nariddh Khean, Serjoscha Düring, the students developed AI-driven urban solutions for the city... 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 →

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 →