Autodesk Research
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We have a feature in Dasher called "kiosk mode". It basically takes control of the browser to run a sequence of operations that show people how Dasher works. I published a series of posts a couple of years ago that explain a bit about how we implemented it. One of the issues in kiosk mode is knowing when Forge viewer operations – such as view transitions or state restorations – are complete. Until recently the code just checked the viewer's progressbar property, to see whether its value was close to 100 or not. This wasn't ever a very good approach,…
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As I mentioned in my last post, I was due to spend the day today at the Geneva Motor Show. It's been 6 years since I participated in the event: I was there with Morgan back in 2014 (and then as a guest in 2015). Over the weekend, however, Switzerland's Federal Council made the (hard, but probably correct) decision to ban events with 1,000 or more attendees. Which of course included the Geneva Motor Show. It's a very strange feeling to see all these events – including many smaller gatherings – being cancelled due to concerns about Covid-19. I was…
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In Dasher we have some interesting functionality to isolate parts of the building by level. This is increasingly something you can do via "out of the box" Forge viewer functionality, but we've found a couple of reasons to go beyond that basic capability: Not all elements or objects are assigned to the correct level. Some elements – such as those belonging to the building facade or perhaps internal pipes – transcend levels, and so don't behave well. It's of course possible to split elements/objects that belong to the second category, but we tend to take the approach of allowing certain…
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I've been heads-down this week on a couple of tasks related to Dasher: the first relates to working on the integration of a new timeline control. I'm hoping this will be ready for people to try in the coming weeks, but we're not quite there yet. The second relates to bringing more data into our time-series back-end from the NEST building: I noticed last week that we were missing data from October of last year onwards. It turns out we had a credentials problem – we have a "conduit" that regularly federates the NEST data into our back-end, but it…
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A few posts ago I mentioned some work was needed to migrate our Dasher 360 shaders to the latest version of the Forge viewer (or the one after it). This work is now complete, so I can share a few thoughts and comments on what was needed to make this happen. Before doing that, though, I need to thank Elias Cohenca for his invaluable help during this process: I can honestly say that without his help the migration would either not have happened or would remain a work in progress. Thanks, Elias! Firstly, it's important to note that even if…
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After a couple of interesting days in Berlin, last week – which for now I'm not going to talk about in detail, maybe another time – I've come across to the UK. This is my first trip since the UK formally left the EU, even if it's still part of the customs union for the remainder of the year. I feel very strongly that this is a bad thing for the country – and for the world – but there you go. There's nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. Yesterday morning I headed to Battersea to visit the…
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On Wednesday I was back at the NEST building on Empa's Dübendorf campus. I've posted about NEST lots of times over the last few years, but these are the main two tours in case you want to track its evolution. I was there to meet Brian Glancy – visiting from Kingspan in Ireland – and Reto Largo from NEST. NEST and Kingspan are two of the main ongoing pilots of Dasher, so it was great to get everyone in the same place to discuss possibilities. Reto started the tour in the media room in NEST, with it's 16-screen media wall.…
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An interesting thing happened when I tried Dasher 360 with the latest production version of the Forge viewer: no sensor dots appeared. As Dasher without sensors is a glorified 3D viewer, this was a bit of a problem. Digging into things a little, I worked out that our custom WebGL shader wasn't working properly in this latest version. At this point I reached out to my friend Elias Cohenca in Tel Aviv for a quick sanity check: he confirmed that this latest version of the Forge viewer is now defaulting to WebGL 2.0. This was confirmed in the Forge viewer…
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Some of you may already have seen Augusto's tweet showing the "Visual Clusters" Forge viewer extension that has been developed by the BIM 360 Design team. It really is super-cool: the extension takes the content of the model loaded in the Forge viewer and clusters it spatially based on the value of the various items' category property. The extension was first published in v7.6 of the Forge viewer, so it's been around a little while. If you don't have a Forge viewer application to test it out with, fear not! Petr Broz has added the capability to load extensions into…
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On Sunday morning I booked an Uber to get across to Bangalore airport for my flight to Pune. It was still early, so the only other being in the street was a cow. It was busier when I arrived at Bangalore airport. And more Christmassy, too. I got myself some idli sambar (the breakfast is better at the domestic terminal than the international one, by all accounts), and then waited by the gate for my SpiceJet flight. The flight was slightly delayed, but basically uneventful – it takes a little over an hour to get from Bangalore to Pune. This…