AU
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As usual, this year's Autodesk University was a crazy tech-fest. Here's a lightning round-up of some of the cool stuff I saw, through the lens of my personal interests and the small amount of spare time I managed to spend exploring. Firstly, AR and VR were everywhere. The Future of Making Things Pavilion had 11 different VR booths, some of which were connected for collaborative experiences. I didn't get to try any (argh!) but I'm told I'll be getting access to the experiences for our VR installation in Neuchatel, in due course. One of my favourite projects in recent years…
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Tuesday was my big day at AU2016: my colleagues, Alex Tessier, and I delivered a short segment during the Construction Launchpad session attended by roughly 1,000 people. This shot gives some idea of the size of the audience. I think it's probably the first time I've delivered a session with a camera showing me in close-up on the big screen. Here are a few tweets from the audience, showing what it probably looked like. Collaborative design review - Autodesk research using Microsoft Halolens. @keanw #au2016 pic.twitter.com/WoAdpa7otE — Clay Helm (@HelmClay) November 15, 2016 Visualising data using @Autodesk Dasher 360 as…
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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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Some quick updates to round off the week… 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…
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It's an exciting time to be a developer working with Autodesk technology. For my entire career at Autodesk, I've been a platform guy at a product company: while much of AutoCAD's success, over the years, can be indirectly attributed to the existence and use of a rich set of APIs, Autodesk has largely (and this is of course a gross generalisation) approached the exposure of APIs as an afterthought, or at least a secondary activity. Some teams have been better than others at building a platform and then a product based on top of it – a shining example is…
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One of the coolest news items to break during AU 2015 was the collaboration between Autodesk and Airbus to design and 3D print a groundbreaking new partition for the A320. Partitions are certainly not the sexiest part of a plane (not that I have a particular opinion on what that might be… the undercarriage, perhaps? 🙂 but even they can have a significant impact on its performance and therefore the environment. Each A320 currently sports a 65kg partition at the back – separating the passenger compartment from the galley – that supports two crew seats and can be opened in…
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One of the highlights of last week's Autodesk University was the chance to experience a prototype integration of Fusion 360 with Microsoft HoloLens. Here's a video showing something of the integration as well as a vision of future functionality: To give HoloLens a try at AU 2015, you had to register for a specific timeslot during the 3-day event: the one that suited me was on Wednesday afternoon, after my last solo speaking engagement but before my last panel session. It turned out they were over-subscribed and a little behind – and they were understandably prioritising Autodesk customers…
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As mentioned in the last post, although I'd visited the Exhibit Hall at Autodesk University a couple of times during the prior days, it was really on Thursday that I spent the most time there. One of the highlights, for me, was in the hall leading to the Exhibition Hall itself: the AU Hive. This is the project I'd been introduced to when visiting the Applied Research Lab on Pier 9. It was an interesting experiment in how humans and robots – coordinated by a "controlling intelligence" – could achieve more together than they could separately: to build a structure…
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Now that the dust has finally settled on Autodesk University 2015, I thought I'd write a couple of posts about some fun I had on Wednesday and Thursday. At this year's event I had classes to deliver on both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings (at 8am and 10am, respectively). This is probably due to the fact I'd requested 90-minute timeslots and they quite sensibly schedule the longer sessions before noon and shorter sessions after it. Which all makes perfect sense. But it also meant that I didn't "let my hair down" properly until Wednesday night, by which point I'd finished my…