MX3D
-
This year's Halloween was destined to disappoint: we'd held out some hope until the 30th that the kids (which just means our youngest, at this point) would end up being able to go trick-or-treating in our village. Understandably – but disappointingly – the announcement came that any kind of trick-or-treating was off the cards for this Halloween. Stricter rules about groups of people were also announced, but with effect from today. From today onwards any kind of public or private event can have a maximum of 5 people present. Given the acceleration of cases in Switzerland, this is completely appropriate.…
-
Over the last month or so we've been focused on the benefits brought to Project Dasher by combining 2D heatmaps with our traditionally 3D view of the world. We started by creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level, before introducing the idea of overlaying building systems information, too. Most recently we took a sneak peek at the topic of today's post, a new UI that simplifies access to these 2D (and 3D) heatmaps. The idea came up during a team meeting: as we realised we had this combinatorial explosion…
-
This week has been a little crazy in terms of presentations. On Monday it kicked off with an internal project review followed by a presentation to a class of Masters students from the University of Southern California (it was a lunchtime session for them, so it was a late evening one for me). It wrapped up yesterday with the generative design session for the Swiss Data Science Center, which despite a few technical hitches (not on my side, thankfully) seemed to go pretty well. I was told there were upwards of 400 attendees registered for the event, but I have…
-
Yesterday I was back at the NEST building in Dübendorf for Autodesk's first BIM 360 community event in Switzerland. It was nice to be back there, even if just to see the progress being made on the construction of the HiLo roof. Here's the view from the ground: I also went up to take a few snaps from the roof. You can clearly see the knitted cabling that will provide support for the structure. There were a few people working on the structure, too. (I took my snaps from an open doorway as I didn't want to disturb them.) But…
-
It's been a crazy (but very cool) few days here in the UK and Ireland. It started with the pre-event (or perhaps the pre-pre-event) of the annual Autodesk football tournament in Dublin. We didn't win, but we had an absolute blast. I'm definitely looking forward to next year's event in Barcelona! On Sunday a group of us flew from Dublin into Heathrow: the others headed directly into town, while I stopped at a friend's for dinner in Windsor. Heading into town, later on, I saw a message from Jaime Rosales: the Circle & District lines were completely closed, so getting…
-
I've been having a lot of fun working on projects I can't really blog about, this week – on the one hand hacking Refinery to add some new UI features I thought would be interesting to explore, and on the other hand working in Dynamo to make some architectural changes to the Van Wijnen tool – so I really haven't had much time to blog about anything here. Hopefully I'll have more to talk about during the last few weeks before the holidays. I did just want to publish this video created by my friend and colleague Merry Wang –…
-
We hit a major milestone with our research into smart infrastructure, this week. After a massive push over the last 3-4 weeks (which in itself was built on work done over several years), we were able to deploy a system that measures – and reports in realtime – the performance and usage of the world's first 3D-printed steel bridge. To give you a quick sense of some of the results of this work, here's an image of Dasher 360 showing the 3D model of the bridge with skeletons walking across it with the bridge's accelerometer readings displayed as a heatmap.…
-
On Sunday I flex across to Amsterdam, once again, this time to take the train down to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week. Alex Tessier and Michael Lee – colleagues who had barely recovered from the last trip across before coming back to help the project with one last big push – had arrived a few days before me. When we got to the bridge – on oversized cycles borrowed from the hotel but clearly intended for giants – the sky was still a little overcast. Alex and Mike got cracking on fixing some stray sensors and connectors. Our "home" for…
-
It's been a whirlwind few days. The trip up to Darmstadt on Monday went relatively smoothly: I had to take four trains to get there, and only missed one connection (the one in Frankfurt, but thankfully I could hop on another train and arrive just 10 minutes later than planned). Still, the nearly 6 hours of train passed reasonably smoothly. After arriving in Darmstadt I met with Sander Lijbers and Tony Thuy, who'd organised to host some customers from the Netherlands. We went for dinner at a nice restaurant serving local food. When in Germany, eat schnitzel! It was a…
-
I've spent most of this week in Amsterdam with colleagues from the Toronto office. Our group descended on the MX3D offices in the funky NDSM wharf area of the city, to make a big push and help get the world's first robotically 3D-printed steel bridge – and its supporting systems – ready for Dutch Design Week. Most of the team stayed in a hotel right next to MX3D, but we did get the chance to take the ferry across to "the mainland" (it isn't really: everything is connected, it just seems that way) from time to time. It was really…