Autodesk
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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…
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Back in October, I had a lot of fun developing some Virtual Reality samples using Autodesk's View & Data API. The samples instanced the A360 viewer component twice in a web-page and controlled the views on these two instances – maintaining a stereoscopic effect – as the mobile viewing device changed orientation. Here's a video we saw in a previous post to give a sense for how these demos work… The original samples were developed for Google Cardboard – which many of you will have received at the recent DevDays events around the world – but they're just as applicable…
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I mentioned this event – an excellent opportunity to kickstart your web or mobile application development efforts – late last year. The original submission deadline was last week, but this has been extended to January 17 – the end of this week! If you can put together a proposal (which shouldn't be more than 1,000 words) by then, you may still be able to participate. As a reminder, Autodesk is hosting the 2-week workshop in our downtown San Francisco offices from March 9-20, and will pay the hotel costs for 1-2 people per company. Get more information here.
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Even if you weren't able to make it across to Las Vegas for AU, this week, then you can still attend the opening keynote, innovation forums, closing session and a number of key classes via live streaming video. Apparently an additional 200+ classes will be recorded for AU Online, but I don't know which – if any – of mine will be. Here are links to the events/sessions in which I'm participating in some way, should you want to check out the posted handouts, samples and presentations. I've put them in chronological order, so people lucky enough to be here…
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In advance of next week's AU, our Cloud Platforms team has released a new version of A360. The key feature of this update is the ability to share and embed A360 models. I uploaded a new model to my A360 account – it works with existing models, too, of course, but it's nice to show something different – and can already see the new "Share" button at the bottom of the model's description in the activity feed. (The button is also available at the top of the viewer screen and as an icon in the data view, in case.) When…
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Autodesk's Cloud Platforms team is running an interesting "incubator" program to encourage software developers to create applications that leverage Autodesk's PaaS layer. (This currently includes the View & Data, AutoCAD I/O, Autodesk Fusion 360, Autodesk BIM 360 and Autodesk ReCap 360 web-service APIs.) I won't go into the details – you can get them here – but I will call out the important points as I see them. 2 weeks of working on your cloud-integrated app in Autodesk's San Francisco office March 9-20, 2015 Autodesk experts on hand to help Open to all, but there's limited capacity 14 companies will…