APS (Forge)
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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.…
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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…
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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. My…
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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 a…
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On Monday I hopped on the train for Paris – which takes just under 4 hours, from Neuchatel to Gare de Lyon – to attend the Intelligent Building Systems exhibition as a guest of Schneider Electric. Leaving Neuchatel the weather was cold but stunning: Going through the Jura, though, we quickly found ourselves in snow. I arrived in Paris in time to meet up for dinner with an old friend. I also managed to get a fair amount of sleep before Tuesday's early start to take the Metro across to Porte de Versailles. The event itself ended up being very…
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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 for…