APS (Forge)
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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 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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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…
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At the Forge Accelerator in Munich, back in December, while I spent most of my time answering what questions I could about Forge I also showed up with a question of my own. In the original prototype of Dasher 360 we used code from a very helpful sample that showed how to add SVG markers to the DOM inside the Forge viewer. The original sample showed this in the context of adding markup to a model: on our side we wanted it to mark the location of sensors in the model. While this was great for small numbers of sensors,…
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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 arbitrary…
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The big news of the last week or so is that the Forge DevCon – which was held at Fort Mason in San Francisco in 2016 – is moving to Las Vegas for 2017. It will take place on November 13 & 14, i.e. Monday and Tuesday of the Autodesk University week (which in recent years has been when the DevDay and DevLab has happened). This is a good thing, in my opinion. Somewhat selfishly it'll mean less travel for those of us coming across from Europe, but it will also make AU a more compelling, developer-centric event. I've been…
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It turns there is a downside to choosing a small airline based in a small airport. My happiness at discovering both the Bern airport and the airline flying out of it was considerably lessened when my flight home was cancelled without explanation, last night. After much shared confusion with my fellow travellers, I ended up being offered a room in airport hotel and an 8am flight out today. So it was that I got back on the phone with Peter Schlipf and ended up joining the Forge Accelerator attendees for one last dinner at Fugazi No. 15. After the initial…
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It's been a challenging few days of "acceleration" in Munich. We've had a large, highly motivated crowd, which has definitely been a highlight. On the lowlight side, during the last 24 hours we've had our first major outage of the Forge platform. A core service, ACM – our Access Control Manager – went down early yesterday morning (for us here in Europe). This impacted both the Data Management and Model Derivative APIs, without which you can't really use the Forge viewer, for example, as well as various other cloud-connected products such as Fusion 360 and Collaboration for Revit. Thankfully the…
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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 at…
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During the lead up to Autodesk University 2016, held a few weeks ago in Las Vegas, we made a number of key updates to Dasher 360. For those of you who haven't heard of it, Dasher 360 is Project Dasher re-imagined for the web using Autodesk's Forge platform. Here's a video that shows many of the enhancements we've made in recent months: Aside from my AU2016 class on Dasher – and how we used Forge to implement it – Alex Tessier and I presented Dasher 360 during the Construction Launch Pad event in front of around 1,000 attendees.…