2017
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Today I was asked to add the ability to place a custom logo onto an instance of the Forge viewer (in my case for Dasher 360, of course). It seemed like an interesting one to share, as I'm sure others have the same requirement. There are probably lots of ways to solve this – for instance by adding the image with its own camera as an overlay inside the Forge viewer's 3D scene – but I decided to stick to something simple and have the browser overlay the image. There are a few changes needed for this to work. Firstly…
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The Forge team (many of whom I worked with back when I was part of the Autodesk Developer Network organisation) have created a new developer blog focused on all things Forge. You'll find a lot of the usual suspects who contributed to the Cloud & Mobile DevBlog (in fact that particular blog's content has already been migrated across to the new site with the Forge branding). I expect lots of helpful information will be posted during the coming weeks/months/years. Be sure to bookmark it and check back regularly. Now if only I could find out how to search the blog's…
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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 VR-related…
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Yesterday Carl Bass announced he would be stepping down as CEO of Autodesk. The news came with the 9am Pacific press release, followed quickly by Carl's email to employees (reproduced here). I'm pretty sure that only a handful of people knew about this in advance: the rest of us were completely stunned. Autodesk has had "participation" from activist investors over the last year and a half or so – they were even mentioned in the press release talking about Carl's departure – so clearly the concern was that Carl was in some way pressured into leaving. At least that was…
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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 the…
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I have some big news. My wife and I have decided to take our three children out of school for a semester and travel around the world for six months. We'll be leaving at the beginning of July and spending a month in each of North America, South America, the South Pacific, ANZ, South Asia and South Africa, returning at the beginning of 2018. This is the reason I'm likely to be skipping AU 2017 and this year's Forge DevCon, by the way. So it goes. During the trip my wife will be "road schooling" the kids for a couple…
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Yesterday I finally took the time to work on one of those tasks that had previously never quite bubbled up to the top of my priority list. Since I've been working on Dasher 360 I've put up with using the developer tools built into Chrome for debugging. While these are pretty good – especially with source-map support, allowing us to debug the source TypeScript code – which is the main reason I haven't taken the time to do otherwise, they do have their limitations: just for instance, you very often start to edit code in the debugger before realising you're…
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Autodesk turned 35 years old, today. To commemorate this event, Shaan has suggested we all wear our oldest Autodesk shirt. I know I have an R14 ARX T-shirt somewhere, but I can't seem to find it (it was always about 5 sizes too big, so it may well have been thrown out). The best I could do were these two polo shirts from circa 2000. I'm not sure which is oldest, so here they both are. I'd joined the company five years before that, in 1995, but was based in Europe: a notoriously merchandising-starved continent, back then. It wasn't until…
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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…
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In the last post we talked about a recent optimization to Dasher 360, where we implemented a point cloud rather than individual SVG-based markers for our various sensors. As mentioned, last time, this was pretty straightforward to get working, but did add some complexity: rather than having seperate DOM-resident markers – which can easily have separate tooltips assigned – we now have a single object and need to be able to display tooltips when individual points in the cloud are hovered over. Here's the basic algorithm we used to determine when an individual sensor was being hovered over: Implement a…