Autodesk
-
Our Silverdraft Demons arrived from L.A. yesterday – they'll form the core of the VR installation in the Autodesk Neuchatel office. Today I had the chance to swing by the office to check them out: they were in our IT area being installed and bound to the network. I do like the idea of binding demons to a corporate network: hopefully they'll stay within our control, this time. The Silverdraft people included some fun schwag in the shipment. Here I am sporting a Demon beanie and a couple of stress balls. I'm definitely more excited than stressed, for now, but…
-
I've been waiting for this piece of news for months: Autodesk LIVE – the "one-click" publishing workflow from Revit to high-quality, interactive 3D visualization courtesy of Stingray – now supports VR via the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift via a public beta. Admittedly it's more like two (or even three!) clicks, but the clicking does seem altogether painless. Here's a video showing what's what: This is great timing, as I've just heard that my Demons are at the doorstep (well, Zurich airport). I'll for sure be kicking the tyres on this workflow over the coming weeks. If you're…
-
The countdown is on… the first Design Night Switzerland is being held at la Case a Chocs in Neuchâtel on October 20th, 2016 to celebrate Autodesk Switzerland's 25th anniversary. (It's actually very timely, as la Case has celebrated its own 25th birthday, this year). The theme for the event is robotics: as I've mentioned before on this blog, some of the first automata – in fact the ones that inspired the movie Hugo – were invented in la Chaux-de-Fonds (also in the canton of Neuchâtel), so there's a long history in the region. And with the world about to embrace…
-
My father used to take me to the Design Museum in London when I was a child: he was a graphic designer and deeply passionate about typography and all other things design-related. I have fond memories of those visits. When visiting The Boston Build Space a few weeks ago, I had the chance to meet with Madeline Gannon, who (it turns out) was working on an upcoming exhibit for the newly relocated Design Museum (it's moving from Butlers Wharf to Kensington High Street, and Madeline's exhibit will be one helping inaugurate the new space in an exhibition entitled "Fear and…
-
At Autodesk we're in the process of equipping a number of our offices around the world with high-end VR showrooms. San Francisco and Boston are already set-up with a number of others currently in progress. It seems likely that Autodesk Neuchatel is going to be one of the next ones to come online, which is a source of great excitement to me, at least. As part of that effort, we've placed orders for two Silverdraft Demon systems as well as two HTC Vive Business Editions. The first Vive arrived yesterday: If you were at the Forge DevCon, you'll already have…
-
The Autodesk App Store Forge and Fusion 360 Hackathon is in full swing. It's running for another month (until October 31st), so if you're interested in earning some money for publishing apps to the Autodesk App Store, there's still time to register. The webcasts being broadcast as part of the Hackathon are of value to people who aren't interested in participating, this time around, of course. Here are the first three – there's another on the Forge Viewer API scheduled for later today. Happy viewing!
-
I mentioned in yesterday's post that Cyrille and I were heading across to Lausanne to host an AR Meetup. It's our third Meetup for this particular group: the first was in the Autodesk office in Neuchatel, while the second and third have been held at the excellent Studio Banana. This one was really fun: between Cyrille and I we had three HoloLens devices for people to try, which made for a really interesting event. Cyrille kicked off proceedings with a discussion of AR and VR in general, and where things stand right now. Key Kawamura – from Studio Banana –…
-
I've had the pleasure of having Cyrille Fauvel from the Forge team with me in Neuchatel, this week. I've worked with Cyrille for many years, and we continue to be interested in very similar technology areas (particularly AR/VR, IoT and robotics/UAVs). So we inevitably have lots to talk about. 🙂 So it's been a fun-packed few days: on Wednesday we spent the afternoon at Microcity at the Innovation World Cup Conference which was focused primarily on wearable computing and IoT. There were a number of presentations both from established platform providers such as STMicroelectronics and BSH (Bosch) and from Swiss-based…
-
A lot of people are asking me about HoloLens at the moment. And I really do mean a lot. This is cool – people are clearly excited about the possibilities of the technology – but it also means I'm spending quite a bit of time adjusting people's expectations about what they can do currently with HoloLens and Autodesk software. I decided to write this blog post – describing where we are today – mainly in an attempt to answer the questions I'm receiving about HoloLens and Autodesk. If you're visiting this post, sometime in the future, bear in mind that…
-
I arrived in Toronto on Sunday afternoon. Customs and immigration was extremely efficient – I just had to wait a while for my bag (one of these days I'll manage to do an 8-day trip with just a carry-on, but not this time). Getting into downtown Toronto was a breeze, too, with the UPExpress from Pearson Airport to Union Station (I'm guessing UP stands for Union-Pearson). It even has free wi-fi – a blessing for international roamers such as myself. Despite its size – and Toronto is *huge* – the downtown area is surprisingly walkable. I don't have a step…