Autodesk Research
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My biggest session from this year's Autodesk University – and the only one that was recorded – has just gone live on the AU website. The segment I'm part of starts 53 minutes into the recording, while I personally start talking at around the 1 hour mark, going through to 1h10. It was an interesting experience, talking to 1,000 people in a single session. While the lead up was a little stressful, I'm certainly happy I did it and – looking back at the recording – feel pretty good about managing to get the main points across reasonably…
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Noble Studios, the contractor who helped develop AutodeskResearch.com, has won a Platinum MarCom Award for the project. The site is indeed really cool: head on over if you haven't been there in a while. I have on my list of things to do – let's now call it a New Year's Resolution for 2017 – to start blogging over there, too. But there are plenty of interesting things to see even before that happens. 😉 Just for instance, check out some of the publications listed for the awesome Jos Stam, as well as some of his own entertaining…
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During the lead up to Autodesk University 2016, held a few weeks ago in Las Vegas, we made a number of key updates to Dasher 360. For those of you who haven't heard of it, Dasher 360 is Project Dasher re-imagined for the web using Autodesk's Forge platform. Here's a video that shows many of the enhancements we've made in recent months: Aside from my AU2016 class on Dasher – and how we used Forge to implement it – Alex Tessier and I presented Dasher 360 during the Construction Launch Pad event in front of around 1,000 attendees.…
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Yesterday I was back at EPFL to visit a number of different people/teams. The main purpose of the trip was to meet with Klaus Schönenberger and Solomzi Makohliso from EssentialTech: an EPFL organization focused on reducing poverty by encouraging transfer of essential technology to developing nations. Examples of technology that has been transferred by the programme are a safe, affordable X-ray technology and a protective suit for working with Ebola patients. Image © 2016 EPFL Alain Herzog The delivery mechanism for the technology will either be an existing company or a startup, depending on the situation. The work EssentialTech is…
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Madeline Gannon's exhibit – featuring Mimus, the industrial robot that reacts to (and even interacts with) visitors – opens tomorrow (November 24th, 2016) at the Design Museum in London. I mentioned Madeline's project in a recent post as I'd had the chance to interact with it at the Autodesk Boston BUILD space. There's also an interesting article discussing the project that's just been posted over on In the Fold. Here's a video describing the motivation behind the project in more depth: If you're interested in how Mimus looks when not surrounded by glass, here's the video I recorded…
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I arrived in Toronto on Sunday afternoon. Customs and immigration was extremely efficient – I just had to wait a while for my bag (one of these days I'll manage to do an 8-day trip with just a carry-on, but not this time). Getting into downtown Toronto was a breeze, too, with the UPExpress from Pearson Airport to Union Station (I'm guessing UP stands for Union-Pearson). It even has free wi-fi – a blessing for international roamers such as myself. Despite its size – and Toronto is *huge* – the downtown area is surprisingly walkable. I don't have a step…
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In the IoT-related (and Forge Viewer-based) prototype I'm spending most of my time working on, we have a long startup operation that instantiates a number of arrays of data with information derived from the BIM. This operation only really needs to be done once per model – every user will get exactly the same information from the model that's loaded in their own browser instance – but we were calculating it on every load of the model in the Forge Viewer. The question I'd like to look at in this post is the appropriate method for memoization of this function…
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Last week this blog sailed through the 10th anniversary of its first post. I can't believe how time has flown… posting 3 times a week for a decade has resulted in 1,448 posts, accumulating more than 6.2 million pageviews. I suppose when something's so much fun you don't really see time passing. Visually, the blog has changed a few times, over the years… (There's a 4th theme that is still in the works, but I've hit a bit of a wall with the content transfer… I've noticed that backslashes have been filtered from the various code samples. I need to…
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Today has been a strange day, to say the least. Waking up to the results of the UK's EU referendum (also known as the "Brexit" vote) was a complete shock, and I'm yet to recover. The world has certainly changed but it's going to be some time before the full impact is felt. Last week in SF I felt a little bit of this, although in a much more positive direction: that we were at a moment in time where things were about to change. Not immediately, and not for everyone, but I definitely came away with the sense that…
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This question has come up more than a few times over the last year or so: I remember a number of Revit developers hitting it when creating Viewer applications at the accelerators in Munich and Prague, for instance. The problem appears to be that RVT files – when translated and loaded into the Viewer – do not have the concept of room objects: they're just spaces. Which presents a challenge for developers who want to work at the room level. Last week I showed a demo during our "Autodesk Research and IoT" session, which showed room-centric navigation built into the…