Autodesk
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It's been a challenging few days of "acceleration" in Munich. We've had a large, highly motivated crowd, which has definitely been a highlight. On the lowlight side, during the last 24 hours we've had our first major outage of the Forge platform. A core service, ACM – our Access Control Manager – went down early yesterday morning (for us here in Europe). This impacted both the Data Management and Model Derivative APIs, without which you can't really use the Forge viewer, for example, as well as various other cloud-connected products such as Fusion 360 and Collaboration for Revit. Thankfully the…
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On Sunday I flew out to Munich for our annual European DevDay. For the first time I chose to fly from Bern's airport in Belp, which is a short 45-minute drive from my home. It's a small airport, so I could park right next to the terminal and walk a short distance to the check-in. Here's the plane I took – an Embraer turbo-prop. Checking into the Ramada Hotel in Munich, I realised I'd stayed here before for one of the Autodesk Soccer tournaments. I'd forgotten how long the corridors were, and I was unfortunately assigned a room right at…
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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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The "call for papers" is now open for the next edition of the Forge DevCon being held at Fort Mason in San Francisco on June 27-28, 2017. Here's a quick reminder of how the first DevCon went down, to whet your appetite. You can already pre-register your interest in attending, but I'm currently more focused on getting potential speakers to sign up to talk. I'll once again be running the AR/VR track (as well as the associated exhibition area) for the event, so if you feel you have something to share in this space, please go ahead and…
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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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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…