Autodesk Research
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Now that the dust has settled on another Autodesk University (the best one ever?) it's a good time to revisit what brought our team to AU, this year. I realize that I've posted a lot of pictures of people wearing helmets and high visibility vests without really explaining what it was all about. Our team at Autodesk Research has been very focused on understanding the human experience of the built environment, with the ultimate goal of making our software tools better at helping our customers design human-centric spaces. Spaces that emphasize occupant well-being in its various forms. Humans are tricky:…
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The last day of AU started, once again with me checking out the Sphere. I have to say that since the Las Vegas Grand Prix has been getting really close the quality of the content has become a bit meh, at least from my perspective. (I think I really like the AI-based art rather than endless commercials for brands I don't care about.)The expo opened earlier on Day 3 - at 10am - and with no general sessions to compete with the flow of people to the stand - and the participation in the study - was very steady throughout.…
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My second day at this year's Autodesk University started with another lovely sunrise.After breakfast I spent an hour or so writing my Day 1 blog post in the Community Zone before I realised a queue was forming to enter the general session. I wandered over and joined it - quite near the front - and chatted with a number of people who were clearly very excited about listening to the day's guest speaker. Here are the people waiting in the Community Zone for the general session to open its doors. I found a single seat free in the third row…
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After a great trip to Stanford on Friday, we had some last-minute preparation to do for our AU exhibit at Pier 9 on Saturday morning. We headed into the office - after having to explain our way through a security cordon along the waterfront due to APEC 2023 - and printed out a bunch of legal waivers for study participants to sign. It seems APEC will be impacting our SF employees, with the offices being closed during the AU week.Enough people had warned me about craziness at SFO that I ended up at the airport well ahead of my flight…
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On Wednesday I headed back across to Zurich airport to fly to San Francisco for a few days ahead of Autodesk University 2023 in Las Vegas.The flight was direct and largely uneventful: I didn't sleep but did feel moderately sane when I arrived in SF. I hopped on BART from the airport to Embarcadero - it's really the best mode of transport if you arrive around 5pm.My room in the Hyatt has a view across SF's financial district. Here's a picture I snapped before sleeping... … and one on waking. I always like seeing the view towards The Bay,…
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On Wednesday I'll be flying out to San Francisco for some meetings ahead of Autodesk University 2023 in Las Vegas. It'll actually be quite nice not to be completely jet-lagged for the first two days of the conference - although as my first class is at 8am on Monday morning it wouldn't be the worst thing to be a bit jet-lagged, honestly. Things are coming together, although there's still some work to be done: From Steps to Stories is debuting tonight in Toronto, so we'll have a good sense of any issues with the larger-scale exhibit ahead of it coming…
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I was sure this series was finished - as indicated in the last post which talked about both VASA's pathfinding and visibility from a point inside Forma, after having talked about a manual approach for connecting the two tools - but I did leave the door ajar to me finding something else to talk about on this topic. Sure enough, I got thinking about the missing "big ticket" item that VASA is able to implement with relatively low effort: visibility from a direction (as opposed to from a point) which can simulate things like shadows cast by direct sunlight. It…
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In a recent post I talked about "From Steps to Stories", the exhibit we're showing in Toronto, hosted by our partners at The Bentway. In that post I promised I'd share more details, nearer the event, and, well, here we are. We recently published a video showing more details about the project. There will be a longer video produced, once we've captured footage of the exhibit in Toronto, but this one tells the story behind the project quite nicely in just 2 minutes. Beyond that, I thought I'd share a couple of shots that give a sense of…
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In the first post in this series we looked at an approach for exporting Forma geometry to an STL file that can be loaded into Dynamo and analysed using VASA, our Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis toolkit. The overall goal is to be able to use VASA for urban-scale analysis of the site context. (Later on I hope we'll also be able to work with more detailed architectural geometry as the level of detail in Forma evolves.) In that post I also alluded to something that's coming soon which will streamline the above workflow: you'll hear more about that at AU…
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If you're interested by the work being done at Autodesk Research - and have a passion for DevOps - then there's a position that has just opened up in the Research Engineering team that is likely to be of interest to you. Photo credit: Nick Amoscato (CC license). The successful applicant will be based in the fantastic Autodesk office in Toronto, Canada, joining our significant Research presence there. While we're not looking for someone fully home-based for this position, as a "hybrid-friendly" role there's certainly potential for working from home. Here is the job posting. And here's a reminder of the…