Autodesk
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I've long been fascinated by stereoscopy, as I suspect is the case for most people lucky enough to have two functioning eyes. There's something magical about a device that immerses us in a three dimensional scene by hijacking that fundamental input mechanism of ours, binocular vision. I almost always get that "oh wow" feeling: it just never gets old. I also happen to like collecting cool bits of vintage technology, although in an admittedly haphazard and opportunistic way: I have printing blocks, a typewriter, a TI-57 programmable calculator, an Apple Newton, a Palm Pilot and an iPAQ, to name a…
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I've been chewing on this for some time, now, but I've decided it's time to act. Well, as soon as AU is over I'll act, anyway. Which I expect means it'll morph into a New Year's resolution for 2015. ๐ Back when this blog was launched, the Git project was still relatively young. But it's clearly become the version control technology to use, especially when putting code out there in the open. And this blog is all about putting stuff out there in the open, after all. Autodesk is using GitHub for our PaaS samples โ which for now includes…
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One of the pieces of feedback I received from internal folk on the prototype VR app I developed for Google Cardboard and then added voice recognition to was "it'd be really cool to add ViewCube-like navigation commands". Which basically meant adding "front", "back", "left", "right", "top" & "bottom" to the list of voice commands recognised by annyang and have them hooked up to a function that changes the view accordingly. The main complication being the fact that some models come in with "Z up" despite the majority having "Y up". Hopefully none will come in with "X up", an eventuality…
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Thanks to all of you who contributed responses to last week's "guess the dashboard" competition. I had a lot of fun seeing the responses roll in! I didn't actually expect anyone to get the "right" answer โ as the service the dashboard is monitoring hadn't been announced publicly, at the time โ but I was impressed by the Autodesk employees who used their knowledge to try and get a free t-shirt โ that's the kind of initiative that helped build this company into what it is today ;-). With 20-20 hindsight I probably should have specifically excluded Autodeskers from participating.…
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I nearly named this post "Creating a stereoscopic viewer for Google Cardboard using the Autodesk 360 viewer โ Part 4", leading on from the series introduction and then parts 1, 2 & 3. But then I decided this topic deserved it's very own title. ๐ The seed for this post was sown during the VR Hackathon, at the beginning of which I had an inspiring chat with Theo Armour. Not only does Theo have a name worthy of a gladiator โ and it turns out there is a list of gladiator names on the Internet, just one more reason I…
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Here's a little bit of fun. There's a new dashboard in the San Rafael office, but what does it show? Post your guess as a comment: the closest โ or most humorous, depending on my mood โ will win a free "Iโฅ3D" Autodesk T-shirt (I'll contact the winner to get their size). And when I say humorous that doesn't mean rude or insulting. Please keep it clean & polite, people. ๐
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It's been a busy few days. After being in full-day meetings on Thursday and Friday, I headed down with Jim Quanci to the VR Hackathon's kick-off event on Friday night. It was held at the newly refurbished Gray Area Theater in San Francisco's Mission district. The Friday night "mega meetup" was a great way to kick the event off, with presentations from NASA's JPL on how they teamed up with Sony to develop a prototype VR system to control robots for asteroid mining. There was also an interesting presentation on the evolution of VR tech from Leap Motion's founder and…
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After introducing the topic, showing a basic stereoscopic viewer using the Autodesk 360 viewer and then adding full-screen and device-tilt navigation, today we're going to extend our UI to allow viewing of multiple models. Firstly it's worth pointing out that for models to be accessible by the viewer that makes use of my client credentials, I also need to upload that content with the same credentials. You can follow the procedure in this previous post to see how you do that, although I believe the ADN team has created some samples that help simplify the process, too. Once you have…
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I'm heading out the door in a few minutes to take the train to Zurich and a (thankfully direct) flight from there to San Francisco. I'll have time on the flight to write up the next part in the series, so all will be in place for this weekend's VR Hackathon. In today's post we're going to extend the implementation we saw yesterday (and introduced on Monday) by adding full-screen viewing and device-tilt navigation. Full-screen mode is easy: I borrowed some code from here that works well, the only thing to keep in mind is that the API can only…
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After yesterday's introduction to this series of posts, today we're going to dive into some specifics, implementing a basic, web-based, stereoscopic viewer. While this series of posts is really about using Google Cardboard to view Autodesk 360 models in 3D (an interesting topic, I hope you'll agree ;-), it's also about how easily you can use the Autodesk 360 viewer to power Google Cardboard: we'll see it's a straightforward way to get 3D content into a visualization system that's really all about 3D. Let's start with some basics. We clearly need two views in our web-page, one for each eye.…