Through the Interface

Rob|Arch 2018

I spent the latter half of last week at ETH Zurich, attending a conference entitled “Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design 2018”, or Rob|Arch 2018 for short. This is the biennial conference where luminaries in the AEC industry get together and plot how robots will replace millions of construction jobs over the years to come. Not really, of course: the big thrust of this conference is to work out how robotic fabrication technology might (or must) be applied to meet the housing needs of a planet whose population is expected to increase by nearly 30% over the coming... Read more →

AR, MoCap and Drones

I’ve had the pleasure of having Cyrille Fauvel from the Forge team with me in Neuchatel, this week. I’ve worked with Cyrille for many years, and we continue to be interested in very similar technology areas (particularly AR/VR, IoT and robotics/UAVs). So we inevitably have lots to talk about. :-) So it’s been a fun-packed few days: on Wednesday we spent the afternoon at Microcity at the Innovation World Cup Conference which was focused primarily on wearable computing and IoT. There were a number of presentations both from established platform providers such as STMicroelectronics and BSH (Bosch) and from... Read more →

Second day at the Forge DevCon

With such a great first day at the Forge DevCon, how would the second (and final) day compare? Here it is, in pictures. :-) As for the first day, Jim Quanci, my long-time friend and former boss, acted as Master of Ceremonies. The first external presenter was Chris Anderson – who I mentioned yesterday. Chris is a very entertaining presenter, and talked about the evolution of the UAV industry. I love Chris’s vision for how drones should evolve: it aligns perfectly with mine. I was very happy to see Thiago da Costa speaking next. Thiago was co-founder of Lagoa,... Read more →

Updates to Autodesk ReCap and Memento

Some serious updates to our reality computing tools have been released in the last few days… here’s a quick round-up with links you can use to go and find out more. ReCap 2.2 Each member of the ReCap portfolio – ReCap, ReCap 360 and ReCap Ultimate – has significant new features in this release. Full details are available here. To summarize just a few, there are new features focused on noise clean-up of point clouds as well as optimizing them for editing performance and project size, and a number of improvements relating to creation of presentation assets such as... Read more →

Flying again

So yes, I’m back flying again. I’m not travelling anywhere, though. Some of you will remember my abortive attempts at UAV piloting from around a year ago. My Quanum Nova has been gathering dust, since then (it’s also in pieces because I tried – so far unsuccessfully – to install a Bluetooth telemetry module). But I’m motivated to get back on that particular horse thanks to a discovery I made a week ago. On a whim, I bought a micro-drone called the Hubsan X4 H107C. This is an incredible little device: you can pick one up for around $50... Read more →

Quite the road trip: 3DRV

Some of you are probably aware of this activity from Shaan’s and Scott’s blogs, but I thought it was overdue a mention here, too. Autodesk is sponsoring the mother of all road trips: over the course of 8 months, TJ McCue is travelling the length and breadth of the United States in a brightly decorated recreational vehicle (RV), spreading the word about 3D technology. TJ is talking to people around the country about reality computing – capture, processing and fabrication processes such as 3D printing – as well as the availability of low-cost design tools. TJ is documenting his... Read more →

The need for autonomous drone navigation

My Quanum Nova arrived from Hong Kong, yesterday. I’d just been tracking the parcel’s progress when the doorbell rang and the postman handed it to me: he seemed surprised I didn’t mind paying the additional SFr 47 customs fee (on top of the $299 price-tag and what I had to pay for batteries) and even let him keep the change. I was in that good a mood. ;-) Reality gradually set in as I assembled the device, although that was pretty straightforward, overall. The assembly instructions were better than expected, and I was soon able to turn the device... Read more →

Updates to Memento and ReCap Studio

The Memento team has been beavering away, delivering a number of updates containing some really interesting features that I’ve so far neglected to mention. In the latest release (hosted on Autodesk Labs on the Autodesk Feedback Community), for instance, you can now access point cloud data via RCP export, as well as being able to generate 3D reconstructions with “Ultra” quality and smart textures (these are features you’d normally have to pay for when using Photo on ReCap 360, but this is being provided for free while it’s still on Autodesk Labs). Here’s a quick reverse chronological look at... Read more →

Autonomous drone navigation for Autodesk Photo on ReCap 360

I’ve been getting very interested in the field of autonomous robot navigation, of late. I own a couple of different robots: while I haven’t quite gotten around to buying a robotic vacuum cleaner, I’ve had an autonomous lawn mower for several years, now, and bought a simple LEGO-carrying programmable robot for my kids for Christmas. One of the reasons I find the field of autonomous robot navigation so interesting is that there’s a great deal of overlap with the algorithms and techniques needed for 3D reconstruction: robots need to sense their environment – often using photo or video input... Read more →

Conceptual modeling in a drone-captured environment

I thought I was done with my posts for the week, but this was too good not to share. The below video shows a scene being captured using a GoPro Hero 3 Black edition on a 5-second timelapse setting mounted on a DJI Phantom drone and processed with Photo on ReCap 360 before being used as a basis for a conceptual model created in Revit 2014. Phew. This is very much a proof-of-concept rather than a genuine project – no architect was involved, for instance – but it does a good job of showing the possibilities of this kind... Read more →

Running drone-captured data through ReCap Photo

Earlier this year I came to know about a “local” company called senseFly. (When I say local, I mean they’re also in the French-speaking area of Switzerland, which is a relatively small region of a small country… I suppose that would be considered local by some standards. :-) senseFly started as a spin-off of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). (EPFL is one of the two top technical universities in Switzerland, the other being Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich)). They specialise in making unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – drones – and now belong to the Parrot... Read more →