Autodesk
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After the first two successful Cloud Accelerators held in San Francisco, it's time to go international. The next one, labeled a Cloud Accelerator Extension, is being held in the beautiful Czech city of Prague from September 13-18, 2015. This is a great opportunity to kick-start your development using Autodesk's PaaS infrastructure. Members of the ADN and Engineering teams – me included – will be on-hand to help you work through any development issues you hit while creating or honing your Autodesk Cloud API-integrated application. So come join me in Prague for a fun week of cloud-oriented development. All you need…
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Looks like this week is going to be all about sweat. Hopefully there won't be blood and tears to go along with it. On Friday I drove with my family across to Verona, Italy, for Autodesk's annual football (soccer) tournament. This year was incredible: 20 teams from around the world showed up with around 600 people (between the players and supporters). We had hoped that Google Maps' estimate of the length of the drive would more or less accurate at 5 hours 40 minutes, but – through no fault of Google's – it ended up taking a brutal 8 hours.…
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It's live! Our entry for the recent VR Hackathon in San Francisco has received a significant amount of spit and polish (OK, perhaps not the best mental image) over the last couple of weeks and is now ready for prime time (i.e. Beta testing ;-). Check it out at http://vrok.it! It should work well with Chrome, Firefox or Safari, although for best results I'd stick with Chrome on mobile devices. The term "vrok" is one I came up with on the trip back from San Francisco… it's a combination of an invented acronym – Virtual Reality Online Collaboration – and…
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I wanted to post on a more in-depth topic, today, but I've been heads-down working on our project from the recent VR Hackathon, getting ready to push it live. We've made really good progress over the last few days, especially considering it's only a part-time project for Lars, Oleg and myself. We've implemented per-session support and a number of other important features (Lars has also spent some serious time re-factoring the code – it's certainly more elegant than what I'd usually crank out ;-). The code is all here, in case. Here's a quick audio-less demo, to give you a…
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I spent some time back down at our local Fab Lab, today, finishing the laser cutting work for the jigsaw project I mentioned previously. Since I last mentioned it, we managed to procure some Plexiglas – in our case it was Perspex, in fact – and cut various sections of the puzzle, with each piece including an engraved word and a hole to make it into a key-chain souvenir. Today's job needed the additional size of the Fab Lab's laser cutter – theirs can cut sheets with 40cm on a side, whereas ours can only manage 30cm – as we…
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The 2nd VR Hackathon, which took place in San Francisco over the weekend, was an absolute blast. It was held at Galvanize, a co-working space about a 15-minute walk from our 1 Market Street office. The venue was great: it had plenty of space but also with a fair amount of natural light (very important for those of us getting over our jetlag). There were fewer people at this second event – inevitably, as it happened over the Memorial Day weekend – but there was nonetheless a great energy in the room. At the core of our team – which…
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This is very cool. As Stephen Preston has reported, over on the Cloud & Mobile DevBlog, the A360 team has delivered a widget that can be embedded in web-pages and views design files – including DWG files saved from AutoCAD, of course – that are dragged & dropped onto it. Basically allowing you to view them as you would in A360, but inside any web-page. Instructions are available at 360.autodesk.com/viewer/widget, although – as Stephen notes – be sure to call adskViewerWidget.Init() with a capital "I". There are two ways to render the widget. You can either render just the drop…
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I'm on the train to Zurich airport, where I'll hop on the direct flight to San Francisco. This evening I'm staying in San Jose, as tomorrow I'll be visiting the SVVR 2015 expo hall to do some research on the latest virtual reality technologies in advance of the coming weekend's VR Hackathon (following on from the one in October). This Hackathon is set to be really fun: while last time I ended up mostly talking with people about Autodesk and the View & Data API, demoing the Google Cardboard prototype I put together – which was also fun, especially when…
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A reminder that proposals are open for AU2015 until May 26th. I've just submitted two, myself. Of the three topics I had in mind – relating to VR, AutoCAD I/O and TypeScript – I decided to submit proposals on the first two: I'll do my best to use TypeScript for one or both of the other two (assuming they get accepted) which will at least give people some exposure to how the technology works. And give some good fodder for blog posts, of course. Here are the abstracts I submitted: Virtual Reality viewing of 3D models using Autodesk's View and…
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In the past I've mentioned the Autodesk Foundation and to some extent the focus Autodesk has on benefiting local communities. Today I was very happy to participate in a charitable teambuilding activity in the office: a group of volunteers spent a couple of hours building prosthetic hands for people in developing countries – very often children who have lost their hands due to landmines. The instructions were straightforward to follow: there were a few tricky parts, but we managed to work through them as a team. The resulting hands will be shipped back to Odyssey Teams in the US, from…