Virtual Reality
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For two of the last three weeks I've been lurking in virtual Forge Accelerators: as I mentioned last time, the Forge team has pivoted to virtual events after this year's Accelerator in Sydney was forced online due to a COVID-related office closure. (Incidentally I need to get used to the team's new name: they recently switched from Forge Partner Development to Developer Advocacy and Support. FPD is no more, the future is DAS!) The DAS team has since gone "all in" on these events, holding two during the month of April. The first one was codenamed Metropolis and ran during…
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This week I decided to take the WebVR/WebXR extension work I did for Van Wijnen to the next level: mainly to integrate metric information in some way into the scene, whether as 3D text objects or via some kind of Heads-Up Display (HUD). But before embarking on this I decided to take another look at the implementation of the HTML client. When I first wrote the HTML page that consumes geometry data from the Refinery server, I decided to use raw JavaScript and WebVR/WebXR calls with three.js. I'd thought briefly about using A-Frame – an awesome framework started by Mozilla…
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It's time to talk about a little project I started over the holiday break: connecting Project Refinery – the optimization engine for Dynamo that will help drive Generative Design workflows – to Virtual Reality. It's a project I've been thinking about for some time, now, and was originally inspired by two things: the workflow Van Wijnen uses Refinery for makes heavy use of VR for visualization – to evaluate designs with internal stakeholders – but right now they export the geometry from Dynamo to Revit and then use Enscape to visualize the scenes. It's not a complicated process, but it…
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Happy New Year! I've just come back online after a wonderful (and much-needed) 2-week break. I hope those of you who were lucky enough to get time off at this time of year made the most of it and managed to spend some quality time with your loved ones. (I will admit that since the beginning of this year I've been spending a little time working on a really fun side project, so I can't say I've disconnected completely… but more on this later. 🙂 As I don't really have an image to accompany this post, here's a quick scenic…
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I spent the latter half of last week at ETH Zurich, attending a conference entitled "Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design 2018", or Rob|Arch 2018 for short. This is the biennial conference where luminaries in the AEC industry get together and plot how robots will replace millions of construction jobs over the years to come. Not really, of course: the big thrust of this conference is to work out how robotic fabrication technology might (or must) be applied to meet the housing needs of a planet whose population is expected to increase by nearly 30% over the coming 30…
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The Forge DevCon is a great place to dive deeply into what's possible – and what will soon be possible – with the Forge platform. I'm involved in the organisation of the Las Vegas DevCon – being held on November 12-13, 2018 – in that I help lead one of the tracks. When the first DevCon took place, back in 2016, I was track-lead for the AR/VR track… these days I'm co-track-lead with my old friend Cyrille Fauvel for the Complementary Technologies track, which incorporates topics such as AR/VR, AI and robotics. All the really fun stuff, basically. 😉 This…
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I've just arrived back from Berlin, which I was primarily visiting for this year's German AEC Hackathon (last year's was in Munich, which I attended briefly in the weeks leading up to our big trip). I was there with my family, and we had a great time visiting the city when I wasn't needed at the Hackathon. Let's start with a few tourist shots. On Thursday we visited a few places, such as the Holocaust Memorial… … and the Berlin Cathedral, which was beautiful inside but had stunning views across the city from its roof. We were staying with an…
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I haven't been spending much time, of late, on XR (the convenient abbreviation for AR/VR/MR), but this blog post got my attention. Our friends at Leap Motion – the company who created interesting technology for capturing hand gestures and who has, over the last few years, executed a fairly successful pivot to focus on XR – have put together an interesting concept that does a good job of making XR compelling for various scenarios. Warning: be careful not to confuse Leap Motion with the once-future-of-mixed-reality-but-now-looking-increasingly-overhyped Magic Leap… 3+ years ago Magic Leap was hot news with their cool promotional videos…
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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…
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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…