Through the Interface

Become a resident at an Autodesk Technology Center and get access to a HoloLens 2

Our Technology Centers team has posted an interesting RFP on LinkedIn: they’ve been working with Microsoft to make HoloLens 2 headsets available to Technology Center residents interested in exploring mixed reality workflows for the AEC and Manufacturing industries. It seems pretty straightforward: if you’re interested in developing a mixed reality solution – whether using Unity, Unreal or WebXR – then you need to submit your proposal before August 24th, 2020. If accepted you’ll be invited into our residency program and provided a HoloLens 2 device for 6 months (with the possibility of extending the term, if needed). This seems... Read more →

Connecting Refinery to VR

It’s time to talk about a little project I started over the holiday break: connecting Project Refinery – the optimization engine for Dynamo that will help drive Generative Design workflows – to Virtual Reality. It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for some time, now, and was originally inspired by two things: the workflow Van Wijnen uses Refinery for makes heavy use of VR for visualization – to evaluate designs with internal stakeholders – but right now they export the geometry from Dynamo to Revit and then use Enscape to visualize the scenes. It’s not a complicated process, but... Read more →

An update on Autodesk’s VR activities

I received an email from a development partner yesterday checking in on Autodesk’s VR offerings. It occurred to me that while I’ve spoken about them at the DevDays in the US and Europe, I haven’t posted anything here. So here’s some fairly up-do-date information on what technologies Autodesk has in the VR space. The way I’ve been tending to classify VR offerings in general is around the “distance from the metal”: i.e. how much (relatively speaking) of the software stack does the executing code need to go through to get down to the display hardware. This is a somewhat... Read more →

Dancing Robot takes the stage at the Las Vegas DevDay

Yesterday Autodesk held its first Developer Day of the 2016 season with a pre-conference event ahead of Autodesk University 2016 in Las Vegas. My old pals at the Developer Network team had asked me to participate, so I came along and presented a session on Virtual and Augmented Reality at Autodesk. The main event was primarily about Forge, natureally enough. It’s great to see how the platform’s evolving, over time. During the VR/AR session we spent time looking at various VR-related technologies available from Autodesk, and then demoed a couple of AR prototypes Cyrille Fauvel and I had created.... Read more →

Sharing a hologram between multiple HoloLens devices – Part 2

It was an interesting week, last week, getting two HoloLens devices to coordinate. After talking about the network infrastructure, last time, today we’re going to look at other levels of the problem. Logistically there’s a requirement to have two devices: it might be possible to get it all working with a mix of devices and emulators, but that seems like a stretch. And you’d need – in any case – to test with physical devices at some point. The good news is that HoloLens distribution is gradually opening up – with devices now available to pre-order in Australia, Ireland,... Read more →

Sharing a hologram between multiple HoloLens devices – Part 1

I’ve been starting to work on extending the “Dancing Robot” HoloLens project to have a shared hologram: basically to have the position changes shared between devices, as well as the angles and speeds of the various parts of the robot arm. There’s quite a lot to this. There needs to be a server somewhere that coordinates the messages sent between the various devices. There needs to be a shared concept of space, so that devices that are in the same room but in different locations – which is all of them, at least for the usage scenarios I’m currently... Read more →

Using HoloLens to display diagnostic information for building components

I’ve been looking at using HoloLens for more “serious” applications (yes, beyond dancing robots :-). One simple prototype I’ve worked on over the last few weeks – once again with the help of Tom Eriksson, who did another stellar job transforming the CAD data into a good-looking Unity model – is to show an electrical transformer and allow the user to pinpoint a technical problem inside it for the purposes of (hopefully predictive) maintenance. Here’s a quick demo video, showing a prototype where we open up the electrical transformer and show its insides before scaling and exploding it and... Read more →

Our dancing HoloLens robot, now viewable in Germany

Just out of curiosity, this morning I decided to go and check the YouTube video we saw in the last post. I’d realised from my messing around with the Star Wars opening crawl that if you include copyrighted content in a video, then sometimes ads get included, too, with the proceeds benefiting the copyright owner. Which is absolutely fair enough, as far as I’m concerned. What I hadn’t realised is that some copyrighted content isn’t viewable in certain countries, presumably at the request of the copyright owner. So due to its use of a Chemical Brothers track, my last... Read more →

Making our HoloLens robot dance!

As promised, way back when we started this series of posts looking at various Windows Holographic platform capabilities to build an app that displays an animated ABB industrial robot inside HoloLens, here’s the part where we make it dance. :-) During Autodesk Switzerland’s 25th anniversary party in late October, people will be able to give the app a try and hopefully see the robot dancing along to whatever tunes the DJ plays. Let’s talk a bit about how the system works… Quite early on I decided against doing the additional audio processing directly on the HoloLens device itself. So... Read more →

Scaling our Unity model in HoloLens

This was a fun piece of functionality and super easy to add. I’d seen a few HoloLens demos where you can scale the model up and down using “bigger” and “smaller” voice commands. There’s even some code in the HoloLens Toolkit that does it. But until I’d actually added it to our robot application, I hadn’t really understood how interesting it was. You can scale a model down and have it sit on your desktop… …or you can scale it up to 10x its realworld size and inspect it in unbelievable close-up mode. From the inside! (Although in fairness... Read more →

Adding spatial sound to our Unity model in HoloLens – Part 3

After the first two parts of this series, where we looked at items 1 & 2 on the below list, it’s time to tackle item 3: A single sound is assigned to our robot When the robot stops completely, so does the sound The same sound is assigned to each of the robot’s parts When each part stops moving, so does the sound for that part A different sound is assigned to each of the robot’s parts When each part stops moving, so does the sound for that part As I mentioned last time, I was fairly happy with... Read more →

Reducing the pain of VR content generation: Autodesk LIVE

Some of you may have heard about the launch of a new Autodesk product, last week, that’s focused on generating interactive 3D environments from Revit models. It’s called Autodesk LIVE and is part of the Autodesk LIVE Design umbrella (at least I think I have that the right way around). Autodesk LIVE Design is all about making it easier to apply best-in-class visualization technology from our Media & Entertainment division – who collectively know a few things about high-end rendering and animation, admittedly – to the world of design and engineering. Here’s a video describing how Autodesk LIVE –... Read more →

Adding spatial sound to our Unity model in HoloLens – Part 2

Last time we looked at a rudimentary – although in some senses complicated – spatial sound implementation for our ABB IRB 6620 industrial robot model inside HoloLens. It was simple because we added a single sound at the root of the robot, and complicated because we then had to track the status of each of the robot’s parts and turn the sound off when all were stopped. In this post we’re going to look at the second of the three design options we saw last time: A single sound is assigned to our robot When the robot stops completely,... Read more →

Adding spatial sound to our Unity model in HoloLens – Part 1

As mentioned last time, upgrading to Windows 10 has opened the door to spatial sound in our HoloLens model. The foundational step is to set our Unity project’s audio settings to have the Spatializer Plugin as the “MS HRTF Spatializer”: if you don’t see this option then you may need to upgrade your OS (as I did). At this point we need to think a little about how best to implement spatial sound in this project, particularly as it literally contains a number of moving parts. I see three main alternatives: A single sound is assigned to our robot... Read more →

Developing for HoloLens on Windows 10

So yes, it does make sense to switch to Windows 10 if you’re doing HoloLens development. As mentioned in a recent post, I’d previously not upgraded any of my work PCs to Windows 10, mainly due to lack of formal support from our IT department. Which isn’t in itself a huge concern, but I do need to connect to certain pieces of corporate infrastructure, so this was enough of a deterrent in the absence of a compelling reason to upgrade. The two main potentially compelling reasons I hit while working on this HoloLens project were: Inability to run the... Read more →

Adding voice commands and spatial mapping to our Unity model in HoloLens

In the last post we added a gaze cursor and some command support for our ABB industrial robot inside HoloLens. The next step I took was to add spatial mapping, allowing the user to select the base of the robot and move it around within the spatially mapped environs. The Holograms 101 tutorial provided very straightforward instructions on how to implement spatial mapping. I once again had to export the “wireframe” material asset from the provided project to get it across into my own, but that was a minor detail. Unfortunately when testing the capability – just as with... Read more →

Adding gaze and gestures to control our Unity model in HoloLens

Now that our industrial robot is animated, I thought it a good time to head back on over and finish more of the Holograms 101 tutorial. The next section of the tutorial focuses on adding a gaze cursor to the application: you have a torus mesh that tracks against the geometry the user is looking at. The instructions were reasonably straightforward – even when retrofitting the approach for a different project – but there were a few “gotchas” that are worth documenting: The simplest way to get the cursor – and its dependent bits and pieces – across into... Read more →

Animating our Unity model for HoloLens

Now that we have our basic model of the ABB 6620 industrial robot inside HoloLens, it’s time to make it move. Tom Eriksson kindly provided some basic scripts to perform rotations on the various parts in the base model. I went ahead and consolidated these into a single “Rotate” script, with parameters (the speed, axis and min/max angles of the rotation) that vary depending on the part being rotated. For instance, some parts can rotate freely around their main axis while others are physically constrained to move between certain angle limits. This is taken care of by the below... Read more →

Displaying your Unity model in 3D using HoloLens

This post shows something really simple, but I decided to share it here as it took me some time to track down. On Saturday I received the 3D model of an ABB industrial robot – the IRB 6620 I mentioned last week – from Tom Eriksson. He’s used a number of tools – including Fusion 360 – to create a gorgeous rendition of this particular robot in Unity. Tom very kindly agreed to share the model, and has spent quite a bit of time helping get it ready for HoloLens. The first version Tom sent unfortunately didn’t work for... Read more →

My first HoloLens application

After managing to get HoloLens working properly, yesterday I dove right into the Holograms 101 tutorial. There are two versions of this tutorial: the classic 101 is for use with a physical device, while 101E is an alternative for the HoloLens Emulator. In my case I had to use the standard 101 version as I’m currently running a mix of Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on my various PCs and the HoloLens Emulator only works with Windows 10. I could upgrade to Windows 10 – or use it in a Hyper-V VM, I suppose – but as it hasn’t... Read more →