Autodesk
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I'm happy to report that a HoloLens device has arrived in the Neuchâtel office. I'm meant to be on holiday, next week, but as the kids are signed up for various fun activities of their own I foresee some amount of fooling around with HoloLens in my immediate future. 🙂 I was pleased to see a few HoloLens devices floating around at the recent Forge DevCon. In some cases it was inevitable – in that one of our speakers, Dona Sarkar, comes from the HoloLens team and also participated in the SFVR Meetup at the DevCon – but a nice…
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Over the last few days, recordings of several of the keynote presentations from the recent Forge DevCon have been made available online. More will be added over the coming days. Here's the YouTube playlist, so you can check them out: To get a sense of the overall event, here's a fun video (also in the above playlist, but worth calling out seperately) compiled from footage taken on the first day of the conference. To finish up, here's a nice video (again, from the playlist 🙂 that was shown during the event and I think does a…
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Last week this blog sailed through the 10th anniversary of its first post. I can't believe how time has flown… posting 3 times a week for a decade has resulted in 1,448 posts, accumulating more than 6.2 million pageviews. I suppose when something's so much fun you don't really see time passing. Visually, the blog has changed a few times, over the years… (There's a 4th theme that is still in the works, but I've hit a bit of a wall with the content transfer… I've noticed that backslashes have been filtered from the various code samples. I need to…
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Today has been a strange day, to say the least. Waking up to the results of the UK's EU referendum (also known as the "Brexit" vote) was a complete shock, and I'm yet to recover. The world has certainly changed but it's going to be some time before the full impact is felt. Last week in SF I felt a little bit of this, although in a much more positive direction: that we were at a moment in time where things were about to change. Not immediately, and not for everyone, but I definitely came away with the sense that…
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After a hectic week in SF, I was looking forward to some relaxation, back in Switzerland, despite having a few visits planned for this week. It didn't quite work out that way, but it was all for the best. On Tuesday I spent most of the day with Hurni Engineering, a very close partner based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the centre of the watchmaking industry – and the home of Le Corbusier and Louis Chevrolet – in Switzerland. I visited alongside Martin von Wartburg (our manufacturing industry salesperson for Switzerland) and Peter Schlipf (the Forge Partner Development Manager for EMEA). It…
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This question has come up more than a few times over the last year or so: I remember a number of Revit developers hitting it when creating Viewer applications at the accelerators in Munich and Prague, for instance. The problem appears to be that RVT files – when translated and loaded into the Viewer – do not have the concept of room objects: they're just spaces. Which presents a challenge for developers who want to work at the room level. Last week I showed a demo during our "Autodesk Research and IoT" session, which showed room-centric navigation built into the…
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With such a great first day at the Forge DevCon, how would the second (and final) day compare? Here it is, in pictures. 🙂 As for the first day, Jim Quanci, my long-time friend and former boss, acted as Master of Ceremonies. The first external presenter was Chris Anderson – who I mentioned yesterday. Chris is a very entertaining presenter, and talked about the evolution of the UAV industry. I love Chris's vision for how drones should evolve: it aligns perfectly with mine. I was very happy to see Thiago da Costa speaking next. Thiago was co-founder of Lagoa, a…
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It was an amazing, whirlwind first day at the first ever Forge DevCon. I was there at 7am to put the finishing touches on the very cool Autodesk VR experience in the exhibit hall. The day's session kicked off with a keynote by Amar Hanspal and a number of other great presenters. I was really pleased with how our VR stand came together. Merten Stroetzel and Hans Kellner – colleagues in the Office of the CTO – provided their deep technical expertise, while JJ Stott and Clementine Joly did an amazing job with their demos. Here's the crew getting settled…
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It was a great weekend of football at Autodesk's annual tournament – this time nicely closely to home in Zurich. The Neuchâtel team did really well in the group round, as in recent years: we came top of Group C, which turned out to be the "group of death" – two teams we beat went on to finish 1st (England) and 3rd (VP Staff). Our goalkeeper – and our rock-solid defence – didn't concede a single goal during any of the matches, until we ended up being knocked out by Barcelona on penalties in the quarter-finals. So it goes –…
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In anticipation of next week's first Forge DevCon, the Forge platform has just been updated. Here's a quick look at what's new and changed: You'll notice there's a new Data Management API, which allows you to access data stored in A360, Fusion 360 and Autodesk's Object Storage Service. This is going to make it much easier to keep things simple and consistent when developing applications requiring access to design data. The Model Derivative API is another new API that does a few different things. Firstly it allows you to translate models into SVF – which is consumed by the…