APS (Forge)
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Hot on the heels of our own, internal Hackathon (although, strictly speaking, this one started before it) there's another external Hackathon running until the end of October. This one's about developing apps using Forge or Fusion 360 and submitting said apps to the Autodesk App Store. The event really has two distinct parts: A series of webinars and Q&A sessions where you can learn about Forge and Fusion 360 development These are free and open to all: there's absolutely no commitment needed to attend An online Hackathon with a financial incentive for you to submit your Forge or Fusion 360…
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This week has been a little hectic, once again. Yesterday I spent the morning back across at ETH Zurich, speaking with members of the Block Research Group about Forge, Dynamo and HoloLens. They've just moved into a brand new building labelled HIB – where the various schools at ETH focusing on architecture from a technological perspective will be co-located – but as it's so new it's yet to be sign-posted. I eventually did find it, but not without asking for directions from 5 different people. Inside the ceiling is pretty cool: they've used a combination of skylights for natural light…
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In the IoT-related (and Forge Viewer-based) prototype I'm spending most of my time working on, we have a long startup operation that instantiates a number of arrays of data with information derived from the BIM. This operation only really needs to be done once per model – every user will get exactly the same information from the model that's loaded in their own browser instance – but we were calculating it on every load of the model in the Forge Viewer. The question I'd like to look at in this post is the appropriate method for memoization of this function…
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I've been spending quite a bit of time working on our "Dasher 360" prototype, recently. Which is, of course, based on the Forge Viewer. A simple – but handy – feature I added today is to add a context menu item to be displayed when objects are selected – and right-clicked – inside the Viewer. In my case I wanted to prototype a possible workflow for a "Send to HoloLens" capability: the feature itself isn't ready (that's what you might call an extreme understatement), but I thought I'd add the menu item in preparation for something being implemented. Here's a…
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I'm happy to report that a HoloLens device has arrived in the Neuchâtel office. I'm meant to be on holiday, next week, but as the kids are signed up for various fun activities of their own I foresee some amount of fooling around with HoloLens in my immediate future. 🙂 I was pleased to see a few HoloLens devices floating around at the recent Forge DevCon. In some cases it was inevitable – in that one of our speakers, Dona Sarkar, comes from the HoloLens team and also participated in the SFVR Meetup at the DevCon – but a nice…
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Over the last few days, recordings of several of the keynote presentations from the recent Forge DevCon have been made available online. More will be added over the coming days. Here's the YouTube playlist, so you can check them out: To get a sense of the overall event, here's a fun video (also in the above playlist, but worth calling out seperately) compiled from footage taken on the first day of the conference. To finish up, here's a nice video (again, from the playlist 🙂 that was shown during the event and I think does a…
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Last week this blog sailed through the 10th anniversary of its first post. I can't believe how time has flown… posting 3 times a week for a decade has resulted in 1,448 posts, accumulating more than 6.2 million pageviews. I suppose when something's so much fun you don't really see time passing. Visually, the blog has changed a few times, over the years… (There's a 4th theme that is still in the works, but I've hit a bit of a wall with the content transfer… I've noticed that backslashes have been filtered from the various code samples. I need to…
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Today has been a strange day, to say the least. Waking up to the results of the UK's EU referendum (also known as the "Brexit" vote) was a complete shock, and I'm yet to recover. The world has certainly changed but it's going to be some time before the full impact is felt. Last week in SF I felt a little bit of this, although in a much more positive direction: that we were at a moment in time where things were about to change. Not immediately, and not for everyone, but I definitely came away with the sense that…
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After a hectic week in SF, I was looking forward to some relaxation, back in Switzerland, despite having a few visits planned for this week. It didn't quite work out that way, but it was all for the best. On Tuesday I spent most of the day with Hurni Engineering, a very close partner based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the centre of the watchmaking industry – and the home of Le Corbusier and Louis Chevrolet – in Switzerland. I visited alongside Martin von Wartburg (our manufacturing industry salesperson for Switzerland) and Peter Schlipf (the Forge Partner Development Manager for EMEA). It…
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This question has come up more than a few times over the last year or so: I remember a number of Revit developers hitting it when creating Viewer applications at the accelerators in Munich and Prague, for instance. The problem appears to be that RVT files – when translated and loaded into the Viewer – do not have the concept of room objects: they're just spaces. Which presents a challenge for developers who want to work at the room level. Last week I showed a demo during our "Autodesk Research and IoT" session, which showed room-centric navigation built into the…