HoloLens
-
I had a really excellent day, yesterday. I'd flown in from Munich, the night before, and stayed at the charming Zum Guten Glück restaurant/hostel in Zurich. After collecting my key I met Rob Morgan – who was also due to speak at the next day's Expanding Immersive Design conference – and we headed out for the pre-arranged dinner together. After a slight Uber-snafu (there are two restaurants named Markthalle in Zurich – who knew?) we found the right place and had a very nice meal, enjoying highly engaging discussions with our fellow speakers. Yesterday morning – rather than heading directly…
-
This is the second time I've been at a Forge Accelerator this year in Munich, and it seems it won't be the last: there'll be another one in early December, adjacent to the European DevDay being held here, and I'm pretty certain I'll be back across for that. It was a fun, whirlwind three days. The weather was nice when I arrived at the office on Monday morning – here's a view across towards one of the nearby buildings. We had lots of participants, which was great. Here's one of the rooms we occupied: The weather was nice enough on…
-
Over the weekend I managed to wind down nicely after giving 10+ hours of HoloLens demos on Thursday and Friday at our Design Night events (it may well have been less, but feels like it was much more). In advance of the Design Night, I'd recorded a video that I ended up putting on a loop during the event. It was an effective way for people coming near the HoloLens exhibit to understand what it was all about. What was particularly interesting to me was whether people understood – or even thought to question – how this video was made.…
-
It was an interesting week, last week, getting two HoloLens devices to coordinate. After talking about the network infrastructure, last time, today we're going to look at other levels of the problem. Logistically there's a requirement to have two devices: it might be possible to get it all working with a mix of devices and emulators, but that seems like a stretch. And you'd need – in any case – to test with physical devices at some point. The good news is that HoloLens distribution is gradually opening up – with devices now available to pre-order in Australia, Ireland, France,…
-
I've been starting to work on extending the "Dancing Robot" HoloLens project to have a shared hologram: basically to have the position changes shared between devices, as well as the angles and speeds of the various parts of the robot arm. There's quite a lot to this. There needs to be a server somewhere that coordinates the messages sent between the various devices. There needs to be a shared concept of space, so that devices that are in the same room but in different locations – which is all of them, at least for the usage scenarios I'm currently considering…
-
The countdown is on… the first Design Night Switzerland is being held at la Case a Chocs in Neuchâtel on October 20th, 2016 to celebrate Autodesk Switzerland's 25th anniversary. (It's actually very timely, as la Case has celebrated its own 25th birthday, this year). The theme for the event is robotics: as I've mentioned before on this blog, some of the first automata – in fact the ones that inspired the movie Hugo – were invented in la Chaux-de-Fonds (also in the canton of Neuchâtel), so there's a long history in the region. And with the world about to embrace…
-
I mentioned in yesterday's post that Cyrille and I were heading across to Lausanne to host an AR Meetup. It's our third Meetup for this particular group: the first was in the Autodesk office in Neuchatel, while the second and third have been held at the excellent Studio Banana. This one was really fun: between Cyrille and I we had three HoloLens devices for people to try, which made for a really interesting event. Cyrille kicked off proceedings with a discussion of AR and VR in general, and where things stand right now. Key Kawamura – from Studio Banana –…
-
I've had the pleasure of having Cyrille Fauvel from the Forge team with me in Neuchatel, this week. I've worked with Cyrille for many years, and we continue to be interested in very similar technology areas (particularly AR/VR, IoT and robotics/UAVs). So we inevitably have lots to talk about. 🙂 So it's been a fun-packed few days: on Wednesday we spent the afternoon at Microcity at the Innovation World Cup Conference which was focused primarily on wearable computing and IoT. There were a number of presentations both from established platform providers such as STMicroelectronics and BSH (Bosch) and from Swiss-based…
-
A lot of people are asking me about HoloLens at the moment. And I really do mean a lot. This is cool – people are clearly excited about the possibilities of the technology – but it also means I'm spending quite a bit of time adjusting people's expectations about what they can do currently with HoloLens and Autodesk software. I decided to write this blog post – describing where we are today – mainly in an attempt to answer the questions I'm receiving about HoloLens and Autodesk. If you're visiting this post, sometime in the future, bear in mind that…
-
Over the last few days we've held Autodesk's first internal, global Hackathon. I started off by not wanting to join a team – I did sign up as an "evangelist", which it turns out means I'm also a judge – but in the end I decided to create a simple HoloLens application. And then Jeremy Tammik suggested we join forces, so we actually were a team, all of a sudden. From my side I focused on creating the HoloLens application – which receives path information from somewhere and displays that to the user – as well as the 2D AutoCAD…