Autodesk
-
Earlier this year Autodesk acquired The Wild along with its own recent acquisition, IrisVR, and their Prospect platform for XR collaboration. This was really exciting news for those of us who believe VR/AR/MR to be hugely interesting technologies with significant potential to impact our customers' workflows. To review, here's a 10-minute video showing how The Wild works: Of course this isn't the first time Autodesk has focused serious resources on developing XR solutions: the first was in the late 80s/early 90s, with the Cyberspace Developer Kit, while another was around 5 years ago with our former (VR-capable) game engine, Stingray,…
-
Registration is now open for this year's AU: the first time it's been held in-person since 2019, and in a brand new city (for AU, at least), New Orleans. It's being held from September 27th to 29th, which will be here really soon! The early-bird pricing of $1,750 is available until July 23rd, at which point it slides upwards to $1,999 until August 12th and then on up to the full price of $2,250 from there. And if you can't make it in person to the event, there's still the option to attend virtually for free. Registration for the "digital…
-
Dynamo 2.15 was released into the wild, last Thursday (at least via Dynamo Core, if not yet Dynamo for Revit), and as Sol Amour says in his blog post, it is "an absolutely epic release". I'd seen it flash by, but only sat up to take proper notice when Sol pinged me on Twitter to mention that includes capabilities inspired by Warnamo, a package I wrote to help keep track of warnings and errors in Dynamo. So I decided to dig into some of the new features – a great resource for this being the habitually comprehensive Dynamo release notes.…
-
I'm in London for a few days this week for some internal meetings and a customer visit. While visiting the Soho office I checked in with my Autodesk Research colleague Allin Groom about a project he and Matt Oosthuizen have undertaken to help reduce the impact of waste in the office. The inspiration for the project was an all too common problem: a lot of waste generated by employees – many of whom buy takeaway lunches at local shops and restaurants – comes in the form of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers. While this material is nominally recyclable, Allin and Matt…
-
If you've visited the Tandem website, this week, you may have seen a little footer saying "Unleash the power of digital twins with Tandem APIs | Now in Beta". This is interesting news for the many (100+, at the last count) developers using Forge to build digital twins. Those using Revit or IFC as a data-source will most probably find the possibility of building on Tandem to be of significant interest. If you click on the "Learn more about APIs" link to the right of the footer, you'll end up on a page that describes the API and SDK available…
-
Today I've been in Munich for the inaugural event in the Forge Data Days tour. As I decided to attend at fairly short notice, I didn't even look into flights: flying from Geneva or Zurich to Munich is expensive at the best of times (considering the distance), and with less than a week of advance notice it would have been ridiculous. So I took the bus, which cost about $20 each way. It's an hour and half to get to Zurich from my place, and the direct bus to the centre of Munich took another four hours. Not bad, really.…
-
I talked recently about the first in-person event tour that's been held for Forge developers in at least a few years, this time focused on the new Forge Data offering (including the Data Exchange API that's now in public beta). At the time I wasn't sure which event I'd attend: there's an in-person (finally!) Forge Accelerator next to the Barcelona event, which made that one especially interesting, for instance. In the end the timing for the Munich event worked best. I've now booked my hotel and bus ticket, and I'll be there for the first event in the global tour…
-
The Autodesk Construction Cloud team kindly shared a post on LinkedIn, last week, about a project I participated in. There's a new book from Springer on "Innovation in Construction" for which I contributed a chapter called "Cutting-Edge Practical Research on Generative Design, IoT and Digital Twins". This chapter weighs in at 29 pages – of an overall 454 for the book – and here's its abstract: This chapter explores two areas of research undertaken by Autodesk over the last decade and how they both have the potential to impact the construction industry. The first area relates to the Internet of…
-
A few events have happened over the last few weeks that I would have loved to have attended, had I had the energy (and been in better shape). The first was the grand opening of the Autodesk Gallery on May 11th. I received an invite – because of my participation in the NEST project – but as I was planning on actually being at the NEST building that day I declined. And I ended up being home with Covid, so there's that. The gallery was opened by SF Mayor London Breed. Here's a snap of Andrew Anagnost showing the NEST…
-
This week I was supposed to be back in Zurich for a couple of days, visiting the NEST building on Tuesday and the ETH campus on Wednesday. As it was, though, I managed to pick up Covid at last week's TechX event in Atlanta, so I ended up staying at home feeling sorry for myself. I haven't had particularly bad symptoms, thankfully: neither headaches nor fever, just mainly a heavy cough and a bit of brain fog, both of which are thankfully clearing up now. Given the value of last week's event I'd certainly say that getting it relatively mildly…