Autodesk
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Last night the section of motorway closest to my home was closed from 10pm to 6am. They closed it to install a new cycle bridge intended primarily for children from one local village to cycle safely to school in another. Closing a motorway is considered quite an event around here, so a small crowd gathered to watch the proceedings in spite of the hour and the pre-spring nip in the air. Admittedly the drinks laid on by the local government – tea or wine, depending on your preferred approach for keeping warm – didn't hurt the mood. At around 11pm…
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One of the announcements at the recent REAL 2015 conference – and if you missed the event, as I did, you can see a great summary here – was the fact that the much-appreciated mesh manipulation tool from our Reality Solutions division, Autodesk Memento, has now entered public beta. It has graduated from Autodesk Labs and is now available for download without you having to log into the beta portal. It also has a brand new web-site describing why you might want to use it. For those of you who have been tracking its progress, release on release, here are…
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I headed over to Geneva yesterday afternoon for the first press day of this year's Geneva Motor Show. I was there courtesy of our friends at the Morgan Motor Company who launched their new Aero 8 (it was actually nice being there as a guest, in contrast to last year's collaboration). Here's the launch video for this exciting car: I love this video, but I did have one minor gripe for the Morgan team: why was Jon Wells, Morgan's Head of Design, shaving a piece of clay rather than using Autodesk tools to develop the design? I was joking –…
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Back in September, Dyson announced their long-awaited entry into the robo-vacuum market with the Dyson 360 Eye. I was delighted to see an old friend of mine, Mike Aldred, in one of the launch videos: Mike and I were undergraduates at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) together, back in the '90s. I was studying European Computer Science (which meant I was on a 4-year degree programme with the 3rd year spent studying Computer Science in Paris) while Mike was studying Computer Systems Engineering. I vaguely recall having common classes together with Mike, although as Mike started at UKC…
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After building native Android apps for both Gear VR and Google Cardboard that embed our web-based VR samples using Autodesk's View & Data API, I really wanted to revisit the UI issue. After seeing the 3D UI capabilities of Gear VR – courtesy of the Oculus Mobile SDK – my own UI that I implemented in HTML felt, well, flat. The main problem seemed to be that it moved with your head, staying stuck to your view. It also suffered from the issue of visual degradation when the selection was away from the middle of the list. All in all…
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So yes, I like Star Wars. And my kids like Star Wars, too. In my office downstairs at home, I have the pride and joy of my modest collection of Star Wars-related goodies, a LEGO Death Star: It pains me to leave it downstairs and only let the kids play with it under supervision, but it was a hassle (albeit a very enjoyable hassle) to build and I'd hate to see it damaged. And if anyone thinks that makes me sound like Will Ferrell's character in the LEGO Movie, they'd be right: there's a lot that resonated in that film,…
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There's a really interesting conference in San Francisco, later this month (groan). It's being held in Fort Mason on February 25-27, and covers all aspects of reality computing, whether relating to capture, compute or create: Autodesk is the main organizer of the event, but there are lots of other companies and institutions involved, too. Check out the list of speakers: there are executives and specialists from Autodesk lined up as well as several eminent names from the industry. Here's a quick video giving a sense of what the conference is all about: And in case you're still interested in registering,…
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When I first got my Google Cardboard toolkit – in my case the DODOcase VR Toolkit V1 – I was fascinated by the NFC tag that came with it. I hadn't really played with NFC, prior to that, and only had a very vague idea of what it was about. It turns out that NFC is this important new(ish) technology that's enabling all kinds of local (hence "near-field") communications. Especially, it seems, in the area of mobile payments with technologies such as Apple Pay. Anyway, my first exposure to NFC was via this business card-sized sticker that came in the…
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I mentioned this in last Friday's post: after building an Android app to bring our web-based VR samples to Gear VR, it made sense to do the same for Google Cardboard. It made sense for 3 reasons: Most importantly, I wanted to see what the additional capabilities of the Android SDK would bring to the web-based VR samples, particularly around the magnetic trigger button. Until the Note 4 gets its Lollipop update in "early 2015" – and WebViews support WebGL – there isn't much more to do with Gear VR. I've completed the plumbing but am waiting for the toilet…
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Today we're following on from last week's post introducing this project where we want to convert the Google Cardboard A360 samples to work in a more integrated manner with the Samsung Gear VR. The main purpose of the project is to see how we can hook up the existing, web-based samples to take advantage of the Gear VR's hardware. We definitely don't want to re-implement any of the visualization stack to be native; if we can use UI hardware events to control the web-based samples in a meaningful way, that'll be just fine for this proof-of-concept. It took some work…