Through the Interface

A visit to Autodesk Munich’s VR Center of Excellence

On Friday I had an hour or so to swing by Autodesk’s Munich office and check out the new VR Center of Excellence. I was on my way to the AEC Hackathon at TUM – Munich’s Technical University – which was kicking off during the early evening. As I’ve found from our much more modest VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel, even simpler VR systems can take quite a bit of maintenance, and so Friday in Munich is generally reserved for the team to fix issues that have cropped up during the week. And the Munich room has way more... Read more →

Autodesk Munich’s VR Center of Excellence

I’ve talked a little about the VR room we have at Autodesk in Neuchatel. Our colleagues in Munich have been building something similar, yet on a totally different level: they’ve just officially opened their “VR Center of Excellence”. And excellent it truly is – check out this video to see for yourself: A lot of what you might assume is post-production in the above video was actually performed in real-time. And at 4K resolution, too! Extremely impressive stuff. I really like what the Munich team has done. I’m hoping I’ll get the chance to poke my nose in on... Read more →

AEC Hackathon is coming to Munich (and so am I)

I’ve been interested in participating in – or at least attending – an AEC Hackathon for a couple of years now. I was first introduced to them during the VR Hackathons I attended in SF in 2014 and 2015 (Damon, Greg and Paul, who help organize the AEC Hackathons, were also organizing/involved in/attending the VR ones). There are a number of AEC Hackathons planned for Europe over the coming months, so I’m happy to say I’ll finally get my chance. I’ve been asked to present at the first – which is in Munich from March 31st – April 2nd... Read more →

Sessions from Expanding Immersive Design 2016

I had a lot of fun presenting some of my WebVR-related research at the Expanding Immersive Design conference in Zurich, late last year. The recording of my session – where I demoed v1 of Vrok-It – is now online: It was very different conference for me: it was held at ZHdK - the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich’s Fine Arts University – and so was inevitably more focused on design as it relates to VR (as opposed to VR as it relates to design, where I’m more focused ;-). But I think my session helped expand the topic of... Read more →

Autodesk’s early role in the VR revolution

A few days ago I was reminded of a topic I’ve highlighted in a number of presentations I’ve given over the last few years, but have never actually talked about on this blog. The closest I came was probably in this post. Many people don’t realise Autodesk was an early innovator in the VR space. In the late 80s and early 90s we had a product called the Cyberspace Developer Kit – which allowed you to deliver around four frames per second of glorious, low-polygon 3D via a 386 or 486 PC – that was clearly ahead of its... Read more →

We are furnished!

Our VR room received its finishing touches yesterday, when our furniture was delivered. Even before being officially ready, the room has seen some more usage. A group of our Enterprise Support managers gave it a try recently after one of their meetings in the Neuchatel office, for instance. Tomorrow I’ll host a “drop in” morning for local Autodesk employees to come by and try it out, which should be fun. I expect it’ll be a few weeks before everyone gets to try it, given the interest people have already expressed in what VR can offer Autodesk customers.Before that, though,... Read more →

WebVR in Chrome and Forge

There’s a lot happening in the world of WebVR at the moment. Today’s big news is that Chrome 56 has now been released for Android, bringing WebVR support to Daydream phones (other devices to follow). This is an important landmark on the journey towards ubiquitous WebVR-capable devices. At some point we’ll be getting a desktop version of Chrome that has WebVR, too: for now I’m still testing with Chromium, as suggested by the WebVR download instructions. The other noteworthy event – at least from Autodesk’s perspective – is the release of v2.13 of the Forge viewer. This brings some... Read more →

VR guinea pigs

On Friday we had our first external visitors to the VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel. Jose and Erich came across from Amstein + Walthert, an engineering firm headquartered in Zurich. Jose had reached out to me – we’ve been in contact a few times, over the years – as he’d read about the VR room on this blog and was curious to try it out. The room still isn’t 100% ready – we’re waiting for some furniture to show up – but it seemed a good opportunity to try out some of our VR demos on live volunteers. Here’s... Read more →

Our VR room is ready!

Today is a good day. After long months of preparation, the VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel is up and running! We’re still waiting for a sofa and chair for waiting guests to relax in, but otherwise all is finally ready. Here’s a quick video I shot to show you around the room. I spent probably a day and a half this week struggling with why the Vives weren’t working properly. The tracking was fine – I could see the supposedly mirrored views just fine – but the Vive displays themselves were blank. At first I thought I’d made a... Read more →

Autodesk Neuchatel’s VR room will soon be open for business!

The work is nearly complete on the VR showroom in Autodesk’s Neuchatel office. Before the big unveiling – which will probably happen early next week, although it’ll probably be a month before the last furniture shows up – I thought I’d share a few snaps taken during the complete build process. Here’s a photo of the original space. The two adjoining walls in the far corner are just partition walls, at this stage. Independently of the room being built, the decision was made to make these walls more permanent. So the first phase was to build permanent walls on... 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 →

Progress on our VR room

Things are moving ahead regarding the VR room we’re building at Autodesk in Neuchatel. Come mid-January we’ll be ready to welcome guests to the Neuchatel office and get them excited about the potential of applying Virtual Reality technology in the design space. This week we had Joel Pennington visit from the Autodesk LIVE team in San Francisco: he trained a number of people from the Neuchatel office on how to use the VR system and went through demos that showcase a variety of Autodesk tools and technologies. The breadth of demos we now have available is impressive and getting... Read more →

The European DevDay in Munich

On Sunday I flew out to Munich for our annual European DevDay. For the first time I chose to fly from Bern’s airport in Belp, which is a short 45-minute drive from my home. It’s a small airport, so I could park right next to the terminal and walk a short distance to the check-in. Here’s the plane I took – an Embraer turbo-prop. Checking into the Ramada Hotel in Munich, I realised I’d stayed here before for one of the Autodesk Soccer tournaments. I’d forgotten how long the corridors were, and I was unfortunately assigned a room right... Read more →

Speak at the Autodesk Forge DevCon 2017: call for papers now open

The “call for papers” is now open for the next edition of the Forge DevCon being held at Fort Mason in San Francisco on June 27-28, 2017. Here’s a quick reminder of how the first DevCon went down, to whet your appetite. You can already pre-register your interest in attending, but I’m currently more focused on getting potential speakers to sign up to talk. I’ll once again be running the AR/VR track (as well as the associated exhibition area) for the event, so if you feel you have something to share in this space, please go ahead and submit... Read more →

Google Earth VR | 3D Rudder

It’s Friday – and a holiday in the US – so it’s time for some fun… Some weeks ago I received an interesting device through the post. It’s called the 3D Rudder and is made by a startup in Marseille. They’ve basically created a foot-controlled joystick with three degrees of freedom, so you can control roll, pitch and yaw, all while keeping your hands free. The makers of the 3D Rudder originally intended it for navigating in 3D design applications – one of the founders is an architect by background – so their interest in me playing with it... Read more →

VR/AR, Generative Design and Robots at AU2016

As usual, this year’s Autodesk University was a crazy tech-fest. Here’s a lightning round-up of some of the cool stuff I saw, through the lens of my personal interests and the small amount of spare time I managed to spend exploring. Firstly, AR and VR were everywhere. The Future of Making Things Pavilion had 11 different VR booths, some of which were connected for collaborative experiences. I didn’t get to try any (argh!) but I’m told I’ll be getting access to the experiences for our VR installation in Neuchatel, in due course. One of my favourite projects in recent... Read more →

Autodesk University 2016: keynotes and classes

Tuesday was my big day at AU2016: my colleagues, Alex Tessier, and I delivered a short segment during the Construction Launchpad session attended by roughly 1,000 people. This shot gives some idea of the size of the audience. I think it’s probably the first time I’ve delivered a session with a camera showing me in close-up on the big screen. Here are a few tweets from the audience, showing what it probably looked like. Collaborative design review - Autodesk research using Microsoft Halolens. @keanw #au2016 pic.twitter.com/WoAdpa7otE— Clay Helm (@HelmClay) November 15, 2016 Visualising data using @Autodesk Dasher 360 as... 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 →

My plans for Autodesk University 2016

On Saturday I’ll be flying out to Las Vegas for the latest Autodesk University. I thought I was going to have a relatively lightweight AU, this year – I have just one class to deliver – but that’s not how it turned out, in the end. My first big engagement is at the ADN pre-conference, where Cyrille Fauvel and I will be talking about VR and AR at Autodesk. It’s going to be a fun session – typically we get around 500 attendees at the DevDay, so it’s a big crowd. While it’s hard to demo these technologies to... Read more →

Using the Forge Viewer at the world’s biggest WebVR hackathon

The world’s biggest WebVR hackathon – Virtuleap – kicked off on Thursday of last week. Before we talk about the hackathon, let’s discuss why it’s an exciting time for this technology… WebVR is exploding on a number of fronts, most of which relate to the industry as a whole, while one is a little more Autodesk-centric. Oculus recently announced support for WebVR – and a new ReactVR framework – in their Carmel browser It was announced a whole month ago – which seems like ages, these days – but this is a significant milestone Google is launching WebVR support... Read more →