Augmented Reality
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Last Thursday registration opened for the latest edition of Autodesk University and its pre-conference events, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct. I've just gone ahead and registered: I'll arrive in Las Vegas on Saturday November 10th (to give myself a fighting chance of handling my jetlag before things kick off properly on Monday the 12th) and head home on the Thursday evening. My classes, this year, fall during the pre-conference and the first day of AU proper, which is nice, especially as it means you won't need a full AU pass to attend (you can find pricing of Monday passes…
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I've just arrived back from Berlin, which I was primarily visiting for this year's German AEC Hackathon (last year's was in Munich, which I attended briefly in the weeks leading up to our big trip). I was there with my family, and we had a great time visiting the city when I wasn't needed at the Hackathon. Let's start with a few tourist shots. On Thursday we visited a few places, such as the Holocaust Memorial… … and the Berlin Cathedral, which was beautiful inside but had stunning views across the city from its roof. We were staying with an…
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I haven't been spending much time, of late, on XR (the convenient abbreviation for AR/VR/MR), but this blog post got my attention. Our friends at Leap Motion – the company who created interesting technology for capturing hand gestures and who has, over the last few years, executed a fairly successful pivot to focus on XR – have put together an interesting concept that does a good job of making XR compelling for various scenarios. Warning: be careful not to confuse Leap Motion with the once-future-of-mixed-reality-but-now-looking-increasingly-overhyped Magic Leap… 3+ years ago Magic Leap was hot news with their cool promotional videos…
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On July 20-22, 2018 I'll be attending the AEC Hackathon in Berlin. Here's some information about the event: The AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) Hackathon is a weekend of geeking at its finest. It gives those designing, building and maintaining our built environment, the opportunity to engage, collaborate and interact on multiple aspects of the building industry. Not all built environment professionals have to code or have much background with tech. Just come with your knowledge, an open mind, collaborative spirit, and willingness to solve Mon-Fri problems leveraging various kinds of technology. We've shaped an exhilarating Program on Robotics, Generative…
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For those of you who – like me – weren't able to travel to Las Vegas for this year's Forge DevCon, I thought I'd do a quick round-up of the major news that I could extract over the wire. I'm sure there will be further blog posts from the Forge team summarising more of things I couldn't see – not being there in person – but this will hopefully be of some use to people, at least. To kick things off, I suggest reading this blog post. It talks about some high-level items, such as additions to the platform, the…
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As much as I hate compressing so much into a single post, I don't see any other option if I'm to bring you all up-to-date. So please accept my apologies for not doing justice to New Zealand's absolutely incredible south island. In this post we'll talk about the first part of the journey through the south island, from Picton to Christchurch. I'll cover the journey from Christchurch to Queenstown in the next post. Here's a quick view of our journey southwards, for context. Our adventure on the south island started the Saturday before last. We took the 2.45pm Interislander ferry…
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There's a very interesting job posting that I wanted to highlight for readers of this blog: Autodesk's Immersive Experiences Group (IXG) is seeking a Senior Evangelist for Augmented and Virtual Reality. IXG is a fairly recently named group at Autodesk: I'm curious about the choice of the term Immersive, as my understanding is that the organisation's mandate is very much also about Augmented and Mixed Reality, which for me is more contextual than immersive. But frankly that's a minor detail: IXG does have a nice ring to it, and we do love our TLAs at Autodesk. Here's an excerpt from…
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OK, so that was perhaps a little mad. Earlier today I spent 5 hours on the train – going from Neuchatel to Zurich and then on the new SBB service via the Gotthard Base Tunnel – to get to Milan, had a coffee with my uncle (who lives and works nearby), gave a 30-minute presentation on Forge and AR/VR at a Meetup, and then spent 4.5 hours on more trains – this time going towards Geneva on the EuroCity (formerly Cisalpino), and then changing at Brig to head via Bern – to get home. This was the main train there…
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On Tuesday, I'll be travelling to Milan and back (on the same day, by train) to present at a "3D / Mixed Reality" Meetup hosted at the beautiful new Microsoft House, headquarters of Microsoft Italia. I'll be talking about Forge and AR/VR, and I'll no doubt include a Dancing Robot or two, I expect. It's pretty cool to be visiting Microsoft House: it was designed by Swiss architect Herzog & De Meuron (a good customer of Autodesk's who I visited earlier this year in Basel) and it looks absolutely stunning. Many thanks to Giorgio Mazzucchelli for extending the invitation to…
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I've been interested in participating in – or at least attending – an AEC Hackathon for a couple of years now. I was first introduced to them during the VR Hackathons I attended in SF in 2014 and 2015 (Damon, Greg and Paul, who help organize the AEC Hackathons, were also organizing/involved in/attending the VR ones). There are a number of AEC Hackathons planned for Europe over the coming months, so I'm happy to say I'll finally get my chance. I've been asked to present at the first – which is in Munich from March 31st – April 2nd –…