APS (Forge)
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With such a great first day at the Forge DevCon, how would the second (and final) day compare? Here it is, in pictures. π As for the first day, Jim Quanci, my long-time friend and former boss, acted as Master of Ceremonies. The first external presenter was Chris Anderson β who I mentioned yesterday. Chris is a very entertaining presenter, and talked about the evolution of the UAV industry. I love Chris's vision for how drones should evolve: it aligns perfectly with mine. I was very happy to see Thiago da Costa speaking next. Thiago was co-founder of Lagoa, a…
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It was an amazing, whirlwind first day at the first ever Forge DevCon. I was there at 7am to put the finishing touches on the very cool Autodesk VR experience in the exhibit hall. The day's session kicked off with a keynote by Amar Hanspal and a number of other great presenters. I was really pleased with how our VR stand came together. Merten Stroetzel and Hans Kellner β colleagues in the Office of the CTO β provided their deep technical expertise, while JJ Stott and Clementine Joly did an amazing job with their demos. Here's the crew getting settled…
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It was a great weekend of football at Autodesk's annual tournament β this time nicely closely to home in Zurich. The NeuchΓ’tel team did really well in the group round, as in recent years: we came top of Group C, which turned out to be the "group of death" β two teams we beat went on to finish 1st (England) and 3rd (VP Staff). Our goalkeeper β and our rock-solid defence β didn't concede a single goal during any of the matches, until we ended up being knocked out by Barcelona on penalties in the quarter-finals. So it goes β…
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In anticipation of next week's first Forge DevCon, the Forge platform has just been updated. Here's a quick look at what's new and changed: You'll notice there's a new Data Management API, which allows you to access data stored in A360, Fusion 360 and Autodesk's Object Storage Service. This is going to make it much easier to keep things simple and consistent when developing applications requiring access to design data. The Model Derivative API is another new API that does a few different things. Firstly it allows you to translate models into SVF β which is consumed by the…
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One of the projects I've been working on β alongside Simon Breslav, a colleague from Autodesk Research Toronto β is a prototype, web-based client for our IoT back-end. I'll be demoing it next week at the Forge DevCon. It uses Forge's viewer component to provide access to sensor readings from within a 3D model. Here are a few sequences of images to give you an idea of what it does. It's still early days, but we're steadily working towards feature parity with the desktop-based Project Dasher. The first sequence shows how you can view the sensors in a building model:…
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My friend and colleague on the ADN team, Lisa Senauke, helped get a bunch of special-branded VR viewers for the upcoming Forge DevCon. If you're coming along and don't get one from attending my class, be sure to swing by the exhibit hall and pick one up. This is the latest "Google Cardboard"-style device from our friends at DODOcase and should even fit 6" smartphones (a problem with the previous generation). They look really cool, even if I do say so myself (I spent a few wild hours inside PhotoShop to create the layout, believe it or not). A big…
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Now that the Tech Summit in Montreal is over, I'm busy with the last bits and pieces in advance of the Forge DevCon in San Francisco. I know I mentioned at some point that I'm helping organise the VR/AR presence at the event β working with internal and external speakers and exhibitors β and it's taking up most of my spare cycles, at the moment. I'm presenting one of the VR sessions myself (as well as co-speaking during an IoT session, but that's another story): one focused on using the View & Data API to implement VR for Google Cardboard.…
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As mentioned in the last post, we're now going to take a closer look at writing extensions for the Autodesk View & Data API. To start with, we're going to create an extension which displays a vertical toolbar docked to the left of the Autodesk viewer. This toolbar will be centred on the viewer area and only contain three buttons: two will be toggles β with events assigned to when they're both clicked and unclicked β while the third will simply launch an action. Here's the JavaScript for this extension: /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension.Toolbar // /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// AutodeskNamespace('Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension'); Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension.Toolbar = function…
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I've been working on a prototype implementation of a research project that makes use of the View & Data API for its visualization. It's interesting to get back into using this API, especially as it's a fundamental piece of the Forge platform. As we expect this particular application to grow, over time, we're using extensions to house logically separate parts of the UI implementation. Extensions are a great mechanism for encapsulating functionality: they're basically JavaScript objects that have load() and unload() methods that are called when the viewer loads/unloads them. A number of samples in the Autodesk samples repository make…
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Some quick updates to round off the weekβ¦ Firstly, a couple of "calls for proposals" have just gone out. Autodesk University 2016 is once again being held in Las Vegas, but this year it'll be earlier than usual: rather than being held right after Thanksgiving, it's now the week before, from November 15-17, 2016. This is going to be a welcome change for all US-based presenters, in that they can deliver their classes at AU and then take a well-deserved Thanksgiving break rather than spending it making last-minute changes to their slide decks and demos. If you're interested in presenting…