Autodesk
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As usual, this year's Autodesk University was a crazy tech-fest. Here's a lightning round-up of some of the cool stuff I saw, through the lens of my personal interests and the small amount of spare time I managed to spend exploring. Firstly, AR and VR were everywhere. The Future of Making Things Pavilion had 11 different VR booths, some of which were connected for collaborative experiences. I didn't get to try any (argh!) but I'm told I'll be getting access to the experiences for our VR installation in Neuchatel, in due course. One of my favourite projects in recent years…
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Tuesday was my big day at AU2016: my colleagues, Alex Tessier, and I delivered a short segment during the Construction Launchpad session attended by roughly 1,000 people. This shot gives some idea of the size of the audience. I think it's probably the first time I've delivered a session with a camera showing me in close-up on the big screen. Here are a few tweets from the audience, showing what it probably looked like. Collaborative design review - Autodesk research using Microsoft Halolens. @keanw #au2016 pic.twitter.com/WoAdpa7otE — Clay Helm (@HelmClay) November 15, 2016 Visualising data using @Autodesk Dasher 360 as…
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Yesterday Autodesk held its first Developer Day of the 2016 season with a pre-conference event ahead of Autodesk University 2016 in Las Vegas. My old pals at the Developer Network team had asked me to participate, so I came along and presented a session on Virtual and Augmented Reality at Autodesk. The main event was primarily about Forge, natureally enough. It's great to see how the platform's evolving, over time. During the VR/AR session we spent time looking at various VR-related technologies available from Autodesk, and then demoed a couple of AR prototypes Cyrille Fauvel and I had created. My…
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On Saturday I'll be flying out to Las Vegas for the latest Autodesk University. I thought I was going to have a relatively lightweight AU, this year – I have just one class to deliver – but that's not how it turned out, in the end. My first big engagement is at the ADN pre-conference, where Cyrille Fauvel and I will be talking about VR and AR at Autodesk. It's going to be a fun session – typically we get around 500 attendees at the DevDay, so it's a big crowd. While it's hard to demo these technologies to a…
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On Monday I hopped on the train for Paris – which takes just under 4 hours, from Neuchatel to Gare de Lyon – to attend the Intelligent Building Systems exhibition as a guest of Schneider Electric. Leaving Neuchatel the weather was cold but stunning: Going through the Jura, though, we quickly found ourselves in snow. I arrived in Paris in time to meet up for dinner with an old friend. I also managed to get a fair amount of sleep before Tuesday's early start to take the Metro across to Porte de Versailles. The event itself ended up being very…
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The world's biggest WebVR hackathon – Virtuleap – kicked off on Thursday of last week. Before we talk about the hackathon, let's discuss why it's an exciting time for this technology… WebVR is exploding on a number of fronts, most of which relate to the industry as a whole, while one is a little more Autodesk-centric. Oculus recently announced support for WebVR – and a new ReactVR framework – in their Carmel browser It was announced a whole month ago – which seems like ages, these days – but this is a significant milestone Google is launching WebVR support for…
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I've finally found the time to get one of the new Demons bound to my service installed with Autodesk VRED, Revit and LIVE. I had some teething issues getting the HTC Vive to work: my rookie mistake was thinking I could connect it to a DisplayPort via a basic DP –> HDMI dongle. This was enough for the PC – and Steam VR – to detect it, but not enough for anything to show inside the HMD. After a phone consult with Merten Stroetzel, I fixed it by having it come off the DVI port (another option would be to use…
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During last week's Forge Accelerator, a developer wanted to strip the standard items from the context menu in his Forge Viewer application. We both searched for a while, until we found the answer: he'd been using this approach to add his own menu items – of course – but it turns out the exact same approach can be used to strip out unwanted items, too. The "context menu callback" receives a menu object that contains its various items: you can inspect them and remove the ones you don't want, or even adopt a more brute-force approach as we've done below and…
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Halloween nearly passed me by completely, this year: the kids did dress up on Friday night – and we had some trick-or-treaters come by over the weekend and this evening – but things have been so hectic, lately, that we didn't hold our (in recent years) annual Halloween party. Next year we'll hopefully have the energy to do another one. To celebrate the occasion in a modest way, at least, I found a nice pumpkin model on the Fusion 360 gallery and uploaded it to Vrok-It: You'll find it on the left-sash at the top of the list (for now,…
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I had a really excellent day, yesterday. I'd flown in from Munich, the night before, and stayed at the charming Zum Guten Glück restaurant/hostel in Zurich. After collecting my key I met Rob Morgan – who was also due to speak at the next day's Expanding Immersive Design conference – and we headed out for the pre-arranged dinner together. After a slight Uber-snafu (there are two restaurants named Markthalle in Zurich – who knew?) we found the right place and had a very nice meal, enjoying highly engaging discussions with our fellow speakers. Yesterday morning – rather than heading directly…