Reality capture
-
Last Friday Microsoft announced a preview SDK for Kinect for Windows 2. As the first public release of the SDK, it seems a good time to publish an initial set of samples for readers to play with. These are very much a work in progress – I tend to restart AutoCAD between Kinect Fusion captures, for instance, as otherwise I've been getting regular crashes – but they should give people a sense of what's possible. And while I haven't yet implemented certain capabilities we had before, I have gone ahead and snuck a few enhancements in (which you'll see in…
-
A few weeks ago I received the official retail version of Kinect for Windows 2 (having signed up for the pre-release program I had the right to two sensors: the initial developer version and the final retail version). After some initial integration work to get the AutoCAD-Kinect samples working with the pre-release Kinect SDK, I hadn't spent time looking at it in the meantime: the main reason being that I was waiting for Kinect Fusion to be part of the SDK. The good (actually, great) news is that it's now there and it's working really well. For those of you…
-
Some of you are probably aware of this activity from Shaan's and Scott's blogs, but I thought it was overdue a mention here, too. Autodesk is sponsoring the mother of all road trips: over the course of 8 months, TJ McCue is travelling the length and breadth of the United States in a brightly decorated recreational vehicle (RV), spreading the word about 3D technology. TJ is talking to people around the country about reality computing – capture, processing and fabrication processes such as 3D printing – as well as the availability of low-cost design tools. TJ is documenting his travels…
-
My Quanum Nova arrived from Hong Kong, yesterday. I'd just been tracking the parcel's progress when the doorbell rang and the postman handed it to me: he seemed surprised I didn't mind paying the additional SFr 47 customs fee (on top of the $299 price-tag and what I had to pay for batteries) and even let him keep the change. I was in that good a mood. 😉 Reality gradually set in as I assembled the device, although that was pretty straightforward, overall. The assembly instructions were better than expected, and I was soon able to turn the device on…
-
The Memento team has been beavering away, delivering a number of updates containing some really interesting features that I've so far neglected to mention. In the latest release (hosted on Autodesk Labs on the Autodesk Feedback Community), for instance, you can now access point cloud data via RCP export, as well as being able to generate 3D reconstructions with "Ultra" quality and smart textures (these are features you'd normally have to pay for when using Photo on ReCap 360, but this is being provided for free while it's still on Autodesk Labs). Here's a quick reverse chronological look at recent…
-
I've been getting very interested in the field of autonomous robot navigation, of late. I own a couple of different robots: while I haven't quite gotten around to buying a robotic vacuum cleaner, I've had an autonomous lawn mower for several years, now, and bought a simple LEGO-carrying programmable robot for my kids for Christmas. One of the reasons I find the field of autonomous robot navigation so interesting is that there's a great deal of overlap with the algorithms and techniques needed for 3D reconstruction: robots need to sense their environment – often using photo or video input –…
-
Just a quick post to finish up the week: over on ProgrammableWeb, there's a nice article talking about the new ReCap Photo Web API and how a number of developers are making use of it to drive interesting new categories of application, such as products creating designs for custom hearing aids or automating the 4D capture of construction sites. Really cool stuff. We'll be talking more about web APIs over the coming weeks. Watch this space!
-
Back in May I pre-announced a couple of webinars that I thought to be of interest to readers of this blog. The first was about ReCap, the second was about posting apps to Autodesk Exchange. The ReCap webinar was actually the beginning of series: at the time of writing five have now taken place (recordings are available for the first four) and two are remaining. Tomorrow's webinar on "Capturing 3D reality data by flying a camera on a UAV" looks very interesting: after eventually managing to catch up with the edX class I signed up for on "navigation for autonomous…
-
My good friend and colleague, Christer Janson, was named 123D's Maker of the Day a couple of weeks ago. This post is to congratulate Christer but also to talk about Christer's background at Autodesk and the key role he plays in the AutoCAD team. I met Christer during the second round interview for my first job at Autodesk, back in 1995. I'd flown across to Switzerland for the interview, although the job itself was to be in the UK: it was a couple more years before I managed to move to Neuchatel for the first time. Back then Christer was…
-
There's a lot happening in the Reality Computing team. Firstly, there's a new Reality Computing blog in town. Be sure to bookmark it or subscribe to it to keep up-to-date on the goings-on in this fast-moving field. Secondly, [thanks to the blog we know] there's a series of webinars – starting today, apologies for the short notice – on Reality Computing topics. They are being held on May 13th, 20th and 27th and the series kicks off today at 9am PST with a session on "The basics of terrestrial 3D laser scanning with ReCap". If you happen to read this in…