IoT

  • The class recordings from this year's Autodesk University held in London's Tobacco Dock are now available for your viewing pleasure. Here's the recording of the class I presented: If you're interested in going a little deeper into the technical aspects of how we've used Autodesk's Forge platform in Dasher 360, then I recommend watching this class from the Forge DevCon at AU 2017 in Las Vegas, where my colleague Simon Breslav presented similar material – but with greater depth – for an audience made up primarily of developers: We have a number of ongoing projects related to Dasher 360, at…

  • On July 20-22, 2018 I'll be attending the AEC Hackathon in Berlin. Here's some information  about the event: The AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) Hackathon is a weekend of geeking at its finest. It gives those designing, building and maintaining our built environment, the opportunity to engage, collaborate and interact on multiple aspects of the building industry. Not all built environment professionals have to code or have much background with tech. Just come with your knowledge, an open mind, collaborative spirit, and willingness to solve Mon-Fri problems leveraging various kinds of technology. We've shaped an exhilarating Program on Robotics, Generative…

  • I'm on the train, heading to Geneva airport for my trip across to Barcelona for the latest Forge Accelerator. It seems there's a good crowd in the room, already, so it should be a fun week. Yesterday I submitted two classes for Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas: I wonder what proportion of classes are submitted on the last day of the CFP period, and whether this number is stable, year after year. I usually try to submit my own classes earlier, but this year things have been a little hectic, for some reason. The first class I submitted is…

  • Over the last few days I've been battling with migrating Dasher 360 from using v3.2.1 of the Forge viewer to the latest & greatest at the time of writing, v4.2. Somewhere around the v4.0 release, quite a few changes were integrated into the viewer that relate to UI theming and docking panels. Some of these are really interesting: the UI feels a lot cleaner than it did with v3.x, for instance. To give a sense for how some of these changes might break an application, here's what happened when I simply upgraded the viewer and stylesheet references in Dasher 360:…

  • In a recent post I mentioned a trip to Amsterdam to visit with Van Wijnen and MX3D. The press embargo has now lifted on MX3D's bridge – as you can see from a slew of recent articles – so I can now share a bit more information about that part of the visit. During that week I spent 2.5 days at MX3D, mostly to participate in discussions about how best to instrument the bridge with sensors. Autodesk started our collaboration with MX3D around the vision of using generative design for the creation of the bridge's form… during the last year…

  • Those of you who have followed the progress on Dasher 360 will be aware that it currently works with a single building (or other) model. It's always been our intention to go "Beyond BIM" (both in terms of addressing the needs of other industries but also scaling up to look at sites and cities) but over the last few weeks we've made a big push, making our first real forays into this new territory. Here's a sneak peek at a campus view in Dasher 360 that integrates an additional Forge viewer control (this might also use a 3D mapping control…

  • I was a little torn about my plans for this week: the Forge team is running a packed Accelerator in Munich, so it would have been great to have spent my week over there. As it happened I ended up coming to the Netherlands, instead, to meet with two incredibly innovative companies, Van Wijnen and MX3D. Despite missing the Accelerator the timing was actually pretty ideal: it proved possible to spend a day and a half with Van Wijnen at Autodesk's office in Hoofddorp before coming into the city to join some of my Autodesk colleagues – Alex Tessier, Alec…

  • I didn't think, on Monday, that I'd be visiting the UK this week. So it came as a surprise that on Tuesday I ended up buying a flight to head across to Birmingham on Wednesday, coming back Friday. You're probably thinking, "ouch, that must have been expensive!" – which was exactly my expectation, looking into flights – but it turns out that at this time of year (probably due to the demand from skiers) EasyJet runs daily flights between Geneva and Birmingham. And – this week, at least – the flights were nearly empty: I managed to get a return…

  • I was really excited to hear, over the weekend, that our friends at Hackrod have launched a successful crowd-funding campaign and that there's still time to participate. The campaign is being hosted on MicroVentures, which means investors should receive interest on their investment as well as equity in the project, assuming things work out. This admittedly seems a nicer model than getting a T-shirt or coffee mug saying you supported their Kickstarter. 😉 I haven't yet decided whether I'm personally going to get in on the action (so to speak) but I thought I'd post about it in case others…

  • During a 3-day event, this week, Autodesk opened its Advanced Manufacturing Facility (AMF) in Birmingham, the UK's second largest city. Here's a video showing some information about this very cool facility. It's one of 6 technology centres that Autodesk is running at various locations around the world. The others are Pier 9 in San Francisco, the Boston BUILD Space, Autodesk Toronto's new MaRS office, the VR Center in Munich and the Materials Lab in Kilsyth, Australia. My team is proud to have been asked to provide technology to be showcased at the AMF: Dasher 360 is running there, providing access…