APS (Forge)

  • Today is a big day for Autodesk Research – and the Dasher team, in particular – in that the path started back in 2009 has now led to Autodesk Tandem integrating core IoT-centric capabilities in their production digital twin offering. Congratulations to my old Dasher colleague, Hali Larsen, and the rest of the Tandem team! This is all really exciting. 🙂 (For more information about the historical connection between Dasher and Tandem, this post from back in January might be helpful.) But anyway – today is all about Tandem. The feature is looking really good, presumably at least partly thanks…

  • On Sunday night I headed to Geneva airport to take a late flight to Copenhagen for a special Sustainability-focused APS Accelerator. I knew something was up with my flight when at 7:49pm the gate information that was promised to be shown at 7:25pm still wasn't posted. (This is Switzerland. Something was badly wrong with this scenario.) It turns out the inbound flight from Nice was delayed by an hour, which meant our flight to Copenhagen would arrive at midnight rather than 11pm. Walking through Copenhagen's beautiful airport at that time of night was highly surreal. It was completely deserted. After…

  • Just as one APS Accelerator is wrapping up (this week's was held in-person in Pune, India and virtually around the world), it's time to think ahead to the next. And this next one is quite special. It's being held in the beautiful city of Copenhagen from March 20-24, 2023, and will have a particular focus on Sustainability. Our friends at Ramboll will be hosting the event at their gorgeous Head Office in the Ørestad neighbourhood of Copenhagen. A fantastic location for an Accelerator! Image courtesy of Ramboll If you have an idea for an impactful, sustainability-related project – perhaps focused…

  • Some huge news was dropped by the Autodesk Tandem team, last week. Their Facility Monitoring feature is now available to Tandem customers as a Beta release. This is effectively the culmination of more than a decade of our research into contextualising sensor (IoT) data inside 3D (mainly BIM) environments. It started through Project Dasher in late 2009, which – passing by our work on Dasher 360 from 2016 – led to the creation of the APS (formerly Forge) viewer's Data Visualization Extension in 2020-21. In this latest phase, Dasher has inspired the Tandem team to build out Dasher-like features to…

  • If you're looking to join Autodesk to work on our platform for building digital twins, then the Tandem team has a number of openings that may be of interest to you. Product Managers – or wannabe PMs – should check out this North America-based posting. For people more interested in Customer Success positions, there's a Europe-based CSM role posted. One more role that's of particular interest to me, at least, is for a Boston-based Developer Advocate. In terms of progress with the Tandem product, I recommend checking out this recent article in AEC Magazine by Martyn Day. Although I would…

  • On Wednesday I came across to Dublin for the latter part of the APS Accelerator being held, here. Jaime Rosales – who has been here with Sergio Leone and Adam Nagy from the APS Developer Advocacy and Support team – has taken some lovely pictures during this trip. The better ones in this post were taken by him. I unfortunately just missed Peter Schlipf – who was here for the first half of the week – which was a great shame. Here are some pictures of the city. We were mostly staying in the Hilton Garden Inn, so to get…

  • Last week – coincidentally on Thanksgiving in the US – Autodesk Switzerland held its first Christmas event since the beginning of the pandemic. The team based in our Gümligen office (which is on the southern outskirts of Bern) joined those of us working from home from various locations throughout the country at a nice restaurant in Bern's city centre for a delicious meal. It was lovely to catch up with old friends and even meet a few new ones. This week has been busy with (largely administrative) year-end tasks, but I have found a few minutes at the beginning of…

  • The Autodesk Platform Services – formerly known as Forge – team is holding one last Accelerator in Europe before the holiday break. It's going to be from December 5-9 in Dublin, Ireland. You can register until November 28. As always these events are a fantastic way to kickstart any new project using APS (Forge) or to accelerate feature development of an existing one. It's basically 5 free days of consulting from Autodesk – all you have to pay for are travel and accommodation. I was already planning a last trip (of the year) to the UK for the following week,…

  • Now that my head is briefly back above water following Autodesk University 2022 and some time off with the family, I thought I'd revisit the Dar 5m Smart Bridge project to share some of the things I learned about it during AU in New Orleans. As a reminder, I was not heavily involved in the building of the bridge itself – although I did track it with great interest from a distance – as my role really only came into play in the final stages of the project, when we were looking to get the data from the bridge into…

  • Autodesk Platform Services – the platform formerly known as Forge – has a brand new service that's soon going into beta: the AEC Cloud Information Model API. This API will allow you to access design parameters in Revit models hosted in the cloud with no need to pass by an instance Revit. The managed beta will give you access to data extracted from a fixed set of Revit sample models that is then hosted in the Autodesk Construction Cloud. It'll be a great way to understand how the API works and provide feedback to the engineering team to steer the…