Autodesk Research
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Our Research team is interested in capturing data about people's experience of the built environment, as hinted at in the last post (despite the fact it was actually for April 1st, as anyone who read it closely hopefully realized). One aspect of this work has been covered in a recent publication that has been accepted as "late breaking work" at CHI 2024 - the Human-Computer Interaction conference being held next month in Hawai'i. Here's a brief video that describes the work: The project looked at whether Vision-Language Models (VLMs) could be used to help evaluate designs along human-centric…
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I'm excited to be pre-announcing a new experience capture platform from Autodesk Research: the Autodesk Vision Am. It's the data capture system we used for our project with The Bentway and showcased at our From Steps to Stories exhibit both in Toronto and at AU 2023 in Las Vegas. The goal is to collect as much data as we can about the human experience of the built environment. You can think of it as a purposefully basic, Amateurish alternative to Apple's Vision Pro, which we hope you'll just want to put on first thing in the Am (i.e. the morning).…
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I've been talking quite a bit about our use of VASA inside Forma via our WebAssembly build of the toolkit (which is still not currently available publicly). I've done quite a lot of work to improve that particular prototype and I'm happy to say it's shaping up nicely: the UX is much better than it was, for instance. I'll be talking about our work on this at an upcoming Autodesk-internal tech conference, and as part of the preparation for this I've spent a few days building a pure Dynamo equivalent of the extension. VASA's Dynamo package is available in the…
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Rhys Goldstein has had one more excellent article published in Towards Data Science. This is the third - and he says final, I hope he's wrong - article in the series. Here they are, along with my accompanying posts: A Short and Direct Walk with Pascal's Triangle Explaining how path counting helps simulate natural navigation A Quick and Clear Look at Grid-Based Visibility Visibility in Space Analysis: an explainer A Sharp and Solid Outline of 3D Grid Neighborhoods This post. 🙂 In this latest installment, Rhys explores one particular aspect of what it means to go from a 2D pathfinding…
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Some weeks ago I joined Evan Troxel for a couple of hours to chat about my journey and some of the projects I've worked on. I've enjoyed the TRXL podcast for some time, so it was a real honour to be invited on. Our discussion has just been published as episode 152. If you prefer video, here's the version from YouTube: Evan's a great interviewer: I enjoyed the session a great deal and I hope you do, too. Listening back to it I realize there's a lot more we could have talked about… hopefully Evan will…
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A very quick update on my holiday "fun". After a bit of work I managed to combine two VASA voxel models - one for the visibility cone and one for its intersection with Forma's site surroundings, something we saw last time - into a single Forma mesh. You can hopefully see that the performance is very decent, and the translucent, fog-like effect of the cone to be a reasonable visual complement to the intersection area. I ended up going through the extra effort to combine them both into a single mesh - putting the vertices together as well as their…
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This week I'm up in the mountains with my family. It's my younger children's winter half-term break, but as I do have a few meetings to attend during the week I decided to only take half days off: snowboarding in the morning and working in the afternoons. I found some time between meetings to work on the VASA inside Forma prototype. My goal for the week was to have the visibility cones displayed for our proposal building - something we saw in the last few posts - intersect with the surrounding geometry, whether other buildings or greenery of some kind.…
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This week I've been continuing some of the work I did during the recent Forma Hackathon in Oslo. Part of this was using the Forma Elements API to extract information about buildings included in the "proposal" being developed. For the Hackathon I'd hardcoded the size of the buildings - the number of floors and the heights of each floor - but the Forma team (thanks, Vilde!) has been helping me figure out how to get this information from Forma. In a nutshell, it's possible to get the grossFloorAreaPolygons for the building of interest and then analyze the associated data: the…
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I'm now back from Oslo, and decided to record the demo I delivered there at the end of the Forma Hackathon (or something approximating it, as I used twice as much time as we were each allocated on the day). Here's a photo shared by the event organizers of me talking: Here's the video I recorded this morning: As I mentioned at the end of the video, the capabilities I've demoed inside this Forma extension could also be implemented using Dynamo for Forma. That's probably something I'll blog more about, at some point, if there's enough interest.
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On Monday I headed to Zurich airport with our eldest son to hop across to Oslo. He's between semesters at Uni - waiting for his exam results to trickle in - and it's great we're getting the chance to get a change of air for a few days.It's rare that I sit in a window seat, so I was sure to capture the view as we left Zurich... … and arrived in snowy Oslo. The weather had impacted our trip very slightly - a 30-minute delay to our 2-hour flight - but we were still happy to touch down in…