Augmented Reality
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After managing to get HoloLens working properly, yesterday I dove right into the Holograms 101 tutorial. There are two versions of this tutorial: the classic 101 is for use with a physical device, while 101E is an alternative for the HoloLens Emulator. In my case I had to use the standard 101 version as I'm currently running a mix of Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on my various PCs and the HoloLens Emulator only works with Windows 10. I could upgrade to Windows 10 – or use it in a Hyper-V VM, I suppose – but as it hasn't yet…
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It took me longer than expected to get HoloLens working, on Friday night. Here are some thoughts that may or not be of use to others when they go through the same process. The initial tutorial was quite fun. A few parts of it were downright entertaining (I loved the coloured triangles, for instance). Device callibration was straightforward: you go through a few steps where you tell the device more about its position by holding up your finger a few times per eye. Entering any serious amount of text using HoloLens is painful: you need to gaze at each letter…
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I'm happy to report that a HoloLens device has arrived in the Neuchâtel office. I'm meant to be on holiday, next week, but as the kids are signed up for various fun activities of their own I foresee some amount of fooling around with HoloLens in my immediate future. 🙂 I was pleased to see a few HoloLens devices floating around at the recent Forge DevCon. In some cases it was inevitable – in that one of our speakers, Dona Sarkar, comes from the HoloLens team and also participated in the SFVR Meetup at the DevCon – but a nice…
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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. 🙂 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 – 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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Preparations are in full swing for the Forge DevCon being held in San Francisco on June 15-16, 2016. Fort Mason is going to be transformed into a Mecca for software developers serving the AEC and Manufacturing industries (or people simply wanting to know more about the Autodesk platform technology). As I've mentioned a few times, I'm in charge of the speaker track for Virtual and Augmented Reality. We have some great speakers lined up: Tony Parisi (one of the inventors of VRML, back in the day) will be talking about WebVR and glTF, Josh Carpenter will be talking about User…
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Registration is now open for the Forge Developer Conference being held at Fort Mason in San Francisco on June 15 & 16, 2016. This event marks a significant shift for Autodesk, as we march towards a future where the majority of software is delivered via the web – and is accessible via web-services. We're still very much at the beginning of this journey and this conference is a great opportunity to be part of it: you can get in on the ground floor and participate actively in this important industry shift. We're expecting upwards of 1,100 developers (from more than…
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As part of the restructuring that went on at Autodesk, last week, I have a new role. This isn't a bad thing, thankfully: in fact it's the opposite… it's something I've been working towards for several years. I've been in the AutoCAD team for the last 4 years and was in the Autodesk Developer Network team for my 16+ years at Autodesk prior to that. These were great environments for me, for quite different reasons, but my ultimate interests lie in where the company (and the broader industry) is heading, technology-wise… one reason I've always felt drawn to the work…
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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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There's a really interesting conference in San Francisco, later this month (groan). It's being held in Fort Mason on February 25-27, and covers all aspects of reality computing, whether relating to capture, compute or create: Autodesk is the main organizer of the event, but there are lots of other companies and institutions involved, too. Check out the list of speakers: there are executives and specialists from Autodesk lined up as well as several eminent names from the industry. Here's a quick video giving a sense of what the conference is all about: And in case you're still interested in registering,…
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I'm down with some kind of stomach bug, so any thoughts I might have had of writing code today are out the window. But luckily there's plenty of juicy technology news buzzing around – especially in the AR space – that's worth reporting on. Interestingly this isn't the first time this has happened. I wonder if my sickness-addled brain has a tendency to gravitate towards "out there" technologies such as AR & VR (especially since reading John C. Wright's The Golden Age trilogy – a must for anyone interested in this domain)? I spent a fair amount of time working…