Augmented Reality
-
I had a really excellent day, yesterday. I'd flown in from Munich, the night before, and stayed at the charming Zum Guten Glück restaurant/hostel in Zurich. After collecting my key I met Rob Morgan – who was also due to speak at the next day's Expanding Immersive Design conference – and we headed out for the pre-arranged dinner together. After a slight Uber-snafu (there are two restaurants named Markthalle in Zurich – who knew?) we found the right place and had a very nice meal, enjoying highly engaging discussions with our fellow speakers. Yesterday morning – rather than heading directly…
-
I mentioned in yesterday's post that Cyrille and I were heading across to Lausanne to host an AR Meetup. It's our third Meetup for this particular group: the first was in the Autodesk office in Neuchatel, while the second and third have been held at the excellent Studio Banana. This one was really fun: between Cyrille and I we had three HoloLens devices for people to try, which made for a really interesting event. Cyrille kicked off proceedings with a discussion of AR and VR in general, and where things stand right now. Key Kawamura – from Studio Banana –…
-
I've had the pleasure of having Cyrille Fauvel from the Forge team with me in Neuchatel, this week. I've worked with Cyrille for many years, and we continue to be interested in very similar technology areas (particularly AR/VR, IoT and robotics/UAVs). So we inevitably have lots to talk about. 🙂 So it's been a fun-packed few days: on Wednesday we spent the afternoon at Microcity at the Innovation World Cup Conference which was focused primarily on wearable computing and IoT. There were a number of presentations both from established platform providers such as STMicroelectronics and BSH (Bosch) and from Swiss-based…
-
After the fun of participating in last week's Hackathon, I headed across to Bern for SINDEX 2016. SINDEX is a biannual exhibition focused on industrial automation. I went to the last one and found it really interesting – well worth going back to, especially given my involvement in IoT and my interest in robotics. The event is probably a smaller, Swiss version of the Hannover Messe, although I'm only really guessing as I've never been there. It was also a good chance to meet with a few companies who will be exhibiting their products at the upcoming Design Night Switzerland…
-
I've been working with a number of local organisations to help prepare the 25th anniversary party we're holding for Autodesk Switzerland in October. One of them is Robosphère, an association in La Chaux de Fonds focused on increasing awareness of the field of robotics. When I was there chatting with Serge Bringolf – the chairman of Robosphère– a few weeks ago, I showed Serge the HoloLens demo I'd been working on. It included a robot, after all. This was Serge's first exposure to mixed reality and he thought it'd be a good topic for a presentation at one of the…
-
We have an internal company Hackathon being held at Autodesk locations around the world on September 6th and 7th. The theme for the event is "What's Next?" and there are variety of sub-themes under which the hacks can fall: Computer as collaborator Future of product interfaces Internet of Things Social good / Sustainability The future of anything else I signed up some time ago to be an "evangelist" for the event, which means I'm a resource for people in the local Neuchatel office should they have questions about VR/AR and IoT (which fall under the second and third sub-themes, respectively),…
-
I've been looking at using HoloLens for more "serious" applications (yes, beyond dancing robots :-). One simple prototype I've worked on over the last few weeks – once again with the help of Tom Eriksson, who did another stellar job transforming the CAD data into a good-looking Unity model – is to show an electrical transformer and allow the user to pinpoint a technical problem inside it for the purposes of (hopefully predictive) maintenance. Here's a quick demo video, showing a prototype where we open up the electrical transformer and show its insides before scaling and exploding it and then…
-
Just out of curiosity, this morning I decided to go and check the YouTube video we saw in the last post. I'd realised from my messing around with the Star Wars opening crawl that if you include copyrighted content in a video, then sometimes ads get included, too, with the proceeds benefiting the copyright owner. Which is absolutely fair enough, as far as I'm concerned. What I hadn't realised is that some copyrighted content isn't viewable in certain countries, presumably at the request of the copyright owner. So due to its use of a Chemical Brothers track, my last video…
-
As promised, way back when we started this series of posts looking at various Windows Holographic platform capabilities to build an app that displays an animated ABB industrial robot inside HoloLens, here's the part where we make it dance. 🙂 During Autodesk Switzerland's 25th anniversary party in late October, people will be able to give the app a try and hopefully see the robot dancing along to whatever tunes the DJ plays. Let's talk a bit about how the system works… Quite early on I decided against doing the additional audio processing directly on the HoloLens device itself. So I…
-
This was a fun piece of functionality and super easy to add. I'd seen a few HoloLens demos where you can scale the model up and down using "bigger" and "smaller" voice commands. There's even some code in the HoloLens Toolkit that does it. But until I'd actually added it to our robot application, I hadn't really understood how interesting it was. You can scale a model down and have it sit on your desktop… …or you can scale it up to 10x its realworld size and inspect it in unbelievable close-up mode. From the inside! (Although in fairness the…