Autodesk
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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…
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This is the second time I've been at a Forge Accelerator this year in Munich, and it seems it won't be the last: there'll be another one in early December, adjacent to the European DevDay being held here, and I'm pretty certain I'll be back across for that. It was a fun, whirlwind three days. The weather was nice when I arrived at the office on Monday morning – here's a view across towards one of the nearby buildings. We had lots of participants, which was great. Here's one of the rooms we occupied: The weather was nice enough on…
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Over the weekend I managed to wind down nicely after giving 10+ hours of HoloLens demos on Thursday and Friday at our Design Night events (it may well have been less, but feels like it was much more). In advance of the Design Night, I'd recorded a video that I ended up putting on a loop during the event. It was an effective way for people coming near the HoloLens exhibit to understand what it was all about. What was particularly interesting to me was whether people understood – or even thought to question – how this video was made.…
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It was a first for the Neuchatel office, so we really weren't quite sure how it was going to turn out. But yesterday's Design Night ended up being a huge success, with around 400 people attending. Wow! I was asked to be part of the core team organising the event several months ago. Aurelia, Olivier and Sokhanita – three colleagues from the Neuchatel office – and I have been meeting on a weekly basis since the beginning of June to plan the event. My role was largely "technological" – in that I was there to help out on all things…
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Yesterday afternoon I popped down to the Case à Chocs in Neuchâtel to see the first of the robots being set up for tomorrow's big event – Design Night Switzerland, celebrating 25 years of Autodesk's presence here. (At the time of writing, there are still tickets left: get yours from here.) The first arrival was courtesy of Rollomatic's Humanoid Power division: they've configured one of their robots to perform that most important of tasks, serving beer. Prospective drinkers get to choose between a "Blonde" and an "Eve", two products from the Cardinal brewery in Fribourg. I'm already know…
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It was an interesting week, last week, getting two HoloLens devices to coordinate. After talking about the network infrastructure, last time, today we're going to look at other levels of the problem. Logistically there's a requirement to have two devices: it might be possible to get it all working with a mix of devices and emulators, but that seems like a stretch. And you'd need – in any case – to test with physical devices at some point. The good news is that HoloLens distribution is gradually opening up – with devices now available to pre-order in Australia, Ireland, France,…