Virtual Reality
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It was an amazing, whirlwind first day at the first ever Forge DevCon. I was there at 7am to put the finishing touches on the very cool Autodesk VR experience in the exhibit hall. The day's session kicked off with a keynote by Amar Hanspal and a number of other great presenters. I was really pleased with how our VR stand came together. Merten Stroetzel and Hans Kellner – colleagues in the Office of the CTO – provided their deep technical expertise, while JJ Stott and Clementine Joly did an amazing job with their demos. Here's the crew getting settled…
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My friend and colleague on the ADN team, Lisa Senauke, helped get a bunch of special-branded VR viewers for the upcoming Forge DevCon. If you're coming along and don't get one from attending my class, be sure to swing by the exhibit hall and pick one up. This is the latest "Google Cardboard"-style device from our friends at DODOcase and should even fit 6" smartphones (a problem with the previous generation). They look really cool, even if I do say so myself (I spent a few wild hours inside PhotoShop to create the layout, believe it or not). A big…
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Now that the Tech Summit in Montreal is over, I'm busy with the last bits and pieces in advance of the Forge DevCon in San Francisco. I know I mentioned at some point that I'm helping organise the VR/AR presence at the event – working with internal and external speakers and exhibitors – and it's taking up most of my spare cycles, at the moment. I'm presenting one of the VR sessions myself (as well as co-speaking during an IoT session, but that's another story): one focused on using the View & Data API to implement VR for Google Cardboard.…
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Preparations are in full swing for the Forge DevCon being held in San Francisco on June 15-16, 2016. Fort Mason is going to be transformed into a Mecca for software developers serving the AEC and Manufacturing industries (or people simply wanting to know more about the Autodesk platform technology). As I've mentioned a few times, I'm in charge of the speaker track for Virtual and Augmented Reality. We have some great speakers lined up: Tony Parisi (one of the inventors of VRML, back in the day) will be talking about WebVR and glTF, Josh Carpenter will be talking about User…
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The tracks have now been posted for the upcoming Forge DevCon in SF on June 15-16, 2016: Forge Basics AEC (including BIM and Generative Design) Manufacturing – Design Manufacturing – Making (including 3D printing and subtractive) Manufacturing – Manage (including PLM, ERP and more) Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Internet of Things Business Development To give people an idea of the content, we've pulled together about 35 class descriptions of the 60 or so we expect to schedule. I'm managing the VR/AR speaker track, so I've been spending time reaching out to and signing up speakers for the 8 or so sessions…
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Right then, time for the big reveal. We've had three parts in this series discussing one basic approach for aggregating stereo panoramas from A360 cloud rendering into a site that uses krpano. Today we're going to see the code itself, and discuss where the project might go from here. If you're more interested in this discussion, scroll down past the code. 🙂 Firstly, though, here's a quick demo of the site, recorded using my Nexus 5X mobile phone. Something I like about the krpano viewer is that you can view in VR as well as non-VR mode, and…
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So far we've introduced this series and taken a look at the format of panoramic images both in A360 cloud rendering and in krpano. The next step – before publishing the code, which I'll do at the beginning of next week – is to take a look at the XML format needed by the krpano viewer. For simplicity, we're going to have a single, top-level krpano scene that links to scenes created for the various stereo panos that we've downloaded and processed from A360 cloud rendering. This top-level scene is copied from a sample scene provided by krpano, but we're…
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Yesterday I had the honour of presenting a Swiss Tech Talk in Autodesk's Neuchatel office. I've attended a number of these events over the last year or so – on such diverse topics as Bluetooth, IP issues related to the cloud and IoT, and the changing face of management consulting – so it was a great pleasure to be invited by the Swiss Tech Association to deliver a session on behalf of Autodesk. I figured the audience wouldn't be interested in hearing about AutoCAD APIs – sure, I find this fascinating, but different strokes and all that – so I…
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In the last post we introduced the idea of a tool that can pull down stereo panoramas rendered in A360 and use them to create a local, aggregate scene for viewing in the Google Cardboard-compatible krpano viewer. Today we're going to start looking at the specifics of such a tool, firstly by describing the structure of an A360 stereo panorama and how we can convert it to a format supported by krpano. You're likely to have URLs in one of two formats for your A360-rendered stereo panoramas: http://pano.autodesk.com/pano.html?url=jpgs/15847dfd-ba8e-4397-9022-0fba2ea5ad19 This is a "Preview on your phone" URL, that isn't published in…
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In these two recent posts we talked about my belief that untethered VR technologies, such as Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR, can be used to deliver really compelling design visualization experiences. This series will focus specifically on how to create a multi-scene VR experience using A360 cloud rendering and a panorama viewer called krpano. Let's start by introducing krpano. This is a fairly powerful tool for creating, publishing and viewing panoramic experiences, whether 2D or 3D. The main focus appears to be 2D – the ability to work with VR scenes is (at the time of writing) only available…