Leap Motion
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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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I'm heading back across to the Bay Area on Wednesday for 10 days. There seems to be a pattern forming to my trips across: I'll spend the first few days in San Francisco – in this case attending internal strategy meetings in our 1 Market office – and then head up after the weekend to San Rafael to work with the members of the AutoCAD engineering team based up there. I'll still probably head back into SF for the odd day, the following week, but that's fine: I really like commuting by ferry from Larkspur to the Embarcadero. The weekend…
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Yesterday I was reminded that 200 sessions from Autodesk University 2013 were recorded and have been made available on-demand – for free! Many great classes are available as well as the keynote and innovation forum sessions. I believe you need to create a free Autodesk account to view them, if you don't already happen to have one. In fact, here's a screengrab from the closing keynote which happens to include a photo (taken by Shaan Hurley, of course) of me with Scott McFarlane (love the sweatshirt 🙂 and Owen Wengerd at the Blogger's Social. I did a quick search for…
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I've been sick in bed since returning from AU2013 – the fever I experienced on Thursday morning, before travelling home in the evening, was apparently due to bacterial bronchitis, and I've been coughing really badly over the last few days. At least the fever has passed, but I did have to cancel my plans to travel to the Munich DevDay. It would have just been too much for me to be on a series of trains for a total of 7 hours each way. Next year. Anyway, here's a quick post I've had sitting around that I've just augmented with…
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I'm sitting in Heathrow Terminal 5, waiting for my connecting flight to Geneva. A good time to reflect back on another intense week at Autodesk University. I arrived in Las Vegas for this year's AU last Saturday evening, flying via the UK on a flight that seemed full with AU attendees (even if Autodesk employees were limited to 20 per flight). Among others I bumped into Tilo Pfliegner from kubit and the CAD Professor himself, Sunith Babu. I've really found that having the extra day in Las Vegas – which I usually spend shopping for the family and hanging out…
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Yesterday I presented a condensed sneak peek of my upcoming AU sessions on Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion to colleagues in the Neuchâtel office (I'll do the same at our office in Gümligen next week). It was good to make sure my various demos are working well in time for AU, as well as creating some awareness around the possibilities presented by these two technologies. We attempted a live capture of a chair using Kinect Fusion, which actually came out surprisingly well (the Kinect's USB cable popped out as I was trying to scan the chair's back, but the command…
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As Labor Day passes and the summer draws to a close, it's time to start thinking about Autodesk University. The AU team clearly knows this (they themselves have been thinking about the event since before AU 2012, so this is more for the rest of us 😉 and so they've gone ahead and posted a preview of the class schedule for this year's event. Take a look at rows 2^8 and 2^8+1 (that's 256 and 257 for non-programmers 🙂 if you're interested in seeing information on the two classes I'm delivering, this year: one is on Leap Motion, the other…
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After my initial fooling around with combining the Leap Motion JavaScript library with Paper.js – and some gentle prompting from Kerry Brown – I started looking at how it might be possible to integrate Leap Motion support into the Meta Balls and Voronoi samples from the Paper.js website. These are both somewhat more complex samples, with Voronoi requiring an external JavaScript library. As usual with the Paper.js samples the posted versions are coded in PaperScript, so I realised I was wrong about needing to code in pure JavaScript to integrate LeapJS with Paper.js. Happy days! 🙂 Anyway, so it turns…
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Today marks the public release of the Leap Motion controller: people who pre-ordered devices will start to receive them today, so it seemed a good time to post something related to it. Last week I came across a really interesting JavaScript library called Paper.js. According to its website, it's "an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and…
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I've been beavering away in an attempt to streamline the AutoCAD-Leap Motion integration samples I posted last week. Here's the updated project. This latest set generally gets better results than the last ones, and the LEAPEXT command certainly feels more snappy and accurate. I'm still trying to find out why the controller occasionally stops seeing my fingers – it could well be down to lighting or to the fact I'm using a Plexiglas surface about the device – but I'll keep looking into it. I know it's still likely to be a month or so before most of you get…