APS (Forge)
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While I'm unlikely to be present for much of next week's Autodesk University event – all being well I'll be in Sardinia – I have been feeling the excitement mount ahead of it. Mainly from attending the Forge Hackathon, which is now nearing it's climax. The event kicked off with a really interesting event held via SpatialChat. I hadn't used it before, but was immediately hooked. There were different rooms (fine), but even within a single room you could have private conversations by moving off into a corner. The sound increases as you get closer to a sound source, whether…
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I mentioned recently that I've been working on updating Project Dasher's use of 3rd party components, and that I had some learnings to share. We started the Forge-based version of Dasher in 2016, and (much to my shame) some of the components had stayed at more-or-less the version available at that time, largely due to the migration effort needed to deal with breaking changes. Biting the bullet to upgrade them was painful but necessary, and right now I (and Dasher) feel nicely refreshed. Last time I mentioned there were two big outstanding dependencies that still required attention: Bootstrap and Rollup.…
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Other that my regular foolings-around with ancient tech, I feel like I've been neglecting this blog in recent weeks. That's all about to change, though, as we enter the busy period leading up to Autodesk University 2021. For one I have some interesting learnings I thought I'd share from some of the foundational work I've been doing on Dasher's codebase, but there are also some interesting updates for people performing analyses of 2D (and 3D!) spaces. Fun stuff! First though, it's worth reminding people of the Forge Hackathon that's around the corner. It starts in just a couple of weeks,…
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Over the last week I've been heads-down on core Dasher work, but with very little visible result. Here's why. Early last week I received an email telling me that it was time to dig into Dasher's use of 3rd party components and make sure there weren't any security issues. (This isn't something unusual – all our products go through this, and many of our research projects, too.) As anyone working on web development projects will know, it's important to go through from time to time to reduce the technical debt that accumulates due to the use of old libraries and…
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My friend and colleague Hali Larsen has joined the Autodesk Tandem team as a Product Manager focused on connected workflows and sustainability. This is huge news, for lots of reasons: for several years Hali played an absolutely instrumental role in Project Dasher – in many ways she was our de facto PM, but also worked through many gnarly issues related to bespoke configuration for various Dasher pilot projects. Hali has a wealth of experience working with customers in this space, and also knows where most of Dasher's skeletons are buried, so she is the right person to take on this…
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A couple of days ago we were looking for the datasheets for the various sensors installed in the MX3D bridge: as you've probably already read, there are nearly a hundred sensors in and on the bridge, although of only about eight different model types. My colleague Josh Cameron said, in passing, "it would be really handy to have these datasheets integrated into Dasher!". As usual, this sent me down a rather fun rabbit-hole for a day or so, to see how we might reasonably integrate these PDFs into Dasher. Firstly it's worth pointing out that these days the Forge viewer…
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The count-down to Autodesk University 2021 continues, with registration for the event now open. I've gone ahead and registered, as I expect many of you will at some point during the remaining 54 days. It's free, after all, and I'm sure will have lots of great content, as usual. Be sure to put the dates in your calendar – October 5-7 for the Americas, October 6-8 for EMEA & APAC, October 13-14 for East Asia. The timing of this year's event – being several weeks earlier – means that it falls during our children's half-term break. This year – all…
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The big news on the Forge side of things over the last few weeks is probably the official release of SVF2. This is a more efficient streaming format the Forge viewer (from v7.25 onwards) can consume. We've been using SVF2 (which was previously known as OTG) for the last couple of years inside Project Dasher, and it's been brilliant. If you're interested in the technical details on SVF2, be sure to check the blog post that announced the SVF2 Beta from late last year. Just for instance, we've seen significant performance improvements from using SVF2 for our public demo using…
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The MX3D team first showed the smart bridge to the public back in October 2018 at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. I was there with the team to finish and test features such as realtime display of skeletons detected using computer vision. Here's a reminder of how that went: An interesting aspect of the public's response to the bridge at DDW2018 was that it had broad appeal to people but that people appreciated different aspects of the project: The majority view: "wow, what a cool-looking bridge!" Those who dug a little deeper: "it was 3D-printed by robots? Interesting…
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On Wednesday afternoon I headed back across to Zurich airport for my second trip to Amsterdam in as many weeks. This time I was flying with Swiss rather than KLM, and ended up checking in and boarding through an area of the airport I didn't recognise at all. Whether this was because it had been so long since I'd been there or due to some deep refurbishment being completed during the pandemic remains to be seen. By the time I arrived in Amsterdam, things had progressed significantly with the MX3D bridge. Here's a fun staged photo by Thijs Wolzak showing…