Through the Interface

Come and try the latest Dasher – now with a new timeline!

After many months of effort, we now have an updated version of Project Dasher available on dasher360.com. (The project is still very much active research, so for now you’re able to try it out with the model of the NEST building, accessible via the Demo button on the main page.) The major feature of this update is the new timeline, which was designed by Autodesk Research and developed by our partner CCTech. This component has been under development for over a year, so it’s really exciting to finally get it into people’s hands. Beyond that, you should really give... Read more →

A decision on social distancing at Autodesk Research

Things have changed a lot at Autodesk, over the last few weeks, as they have for most people on the planet. Working from home has become the norm: for someone who works from home, anyway, it’s been interesting to see the playing field levelled a little: with everyone working remotely the dynamic in meetings has been very different. I have to admit that in many ways it’s refreshing for me, personally, especially when combined with the fact I’m able to focus on “real” work, without having the regular distraction of travel to deal with. People are even socializing via... Read more →

Celebrating at a distance

We’ve just finished celebrating the 20th anniversary of a dear friend and colleague, Clayton Hotson, joining Autodesk. We were in the same team, way back when Clayton joined, both working from our San Rafael office. Over the years we’ve ended up doing other things, but in the last few months have happily found ourselves back together in the Research Engineering team (the awesome group that was responsible for incubating Dreamcatcher…. it’s a serious honour to be working with this team). Anyway, today we got together and had a surprise celebration for Clayton. We dug up some photos of Clayton... Read more →

A significant update to Dasher is on the way

For the last week or so I’ve been busy making sure Dasher works well with multiple themes. You can see the progress across these posts. I’m not quite ready for a full unveiling, but it should go live at some point in the next week, give or take. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the main page (you’ll be able to select the theme either as you enter Dasher via the front page or from within the application’s settings UI, which is integrated into the Forge viewer’s). One of the big-ticket items in this coming release will... Read more →

Thoughts on our new situation

I’m sure we’ve all been thinking lots about the developing situation we’re living through at the moment. Between markets crashing, social distancing, school closures and home-working, the world looks very different than it did a few short weeks ago. The below poem came through my inbox, this morning (thanks, Mum!) and it definitely resonated with some hopes I’ve had about the crisis. IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC And the people stayed home. And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And they... Read more →

Changing HIG themes at runtime in a Forge application

Despite the unfolding horror of the situation with Covid-19 – and stuff is really starting to hit the fan, here in Switzerland, with schools and non-essential commerces being closed and rumours of an enforced sequestration being considered – I’m at least getting some quality time to work on Dasher. Last week we saw how it was possible to support both dark and light themes from the Autodesk HIG in a Forge viewer application. I mentioned both times my desire to allow Dasher’s theme to be selected by the user at runtime. After searching fruitlessly on the internet for some... Read more →

Using the HIG to implement a light mode in a Forge application

Last time we saw how it’s possible to use Autodesk’s HIG to add different visual themes to a Forge viewer application. When I first started down this path, I thought I’d probably just stop at implementing another dark theme inside Dasher: I suspected it would be a lot of work to implement a light theme. It turns out I was wrong: towards the end of last year I’d spent a few days rationalising our use of styles inside Dasher, by eradicating every use of “hardcoded” colours inside CSS styles and have them stored in SCSS variables. It felt like... Read more →

Supporting multiple visual themes in a Forge application using the Autodesk Human Interface Guidelines

I mentioned in the last post that I’ve been working on integrating a new timeline component into Dasher. By default the component supports a different visual theme than the one we’ve been using in Dasher: in order to make the look & feel consistent, I had to include Autodesk’s HIG toolkit in the Dasher project. HIG stands for Human Interface Guidelines, and it’s Autodesk’s effort to increase visual consistency across our products (especially those that are web-based). And the best thing is, it’s open source and available for anyone to integrate in their projects via npm or yarn. And... Read more →

Knowing when operations are complete in the Forge viewer

We have a feature in Dasher called “kiosk mode”. It basically takes control of the browser to run a sequence of operations that show people how Dasher works. I published a series of posts a couple of years ago that explain a bit about how we implemented it. One of the issues in kiosk mode is knowing when Forge viewer operations – such as view transitions or state restorations – are complete. Until recently the code just checked the viewer’s progressbar property, to see whether its value was close to 100 or not. This wasn’t ever a very good... Read more →

The BAC Mono 2020 and its generatively designed wheels

As I mentioned in my last post, I was due to spend the day today at the Geneva Motor Show. It’s been 6 years since I participated in the event: I was there with Morgan back in 2014 (and then as a guest in 2015). Over the weekend, however, Switzerland’s Federal Council made the (hard, but probably correct) decision to ban events with 1,000 or more attendees. Which of course included the Geneva Motor Show. It’s a very strange feeling to see all these events – including many smaller gatherings – being cancelled due to concerns about Covid-19. I... Read more →

Grindelwald, the Jungfraujoch and a week off

I was back home on Thursday night with enough time to have dinner with my family before getting an early night (a relatively easy thing to do after a busy week in Soho). I was out of the door at 5:30am on Friday to get across to Grindelwald for the Gümligen Engineering team’s annual ski day. I changed trains in Bern. And yes, there is a suburb of Bern called Wankdorf, which does indeed cause endless amusement to Brits. It was a little before 7am by the time I got to the Gümligen office, meeting Nenad, Martyn and Adrian:... Read more →

The first Forge Accelerator in London

This week I’ve had the pleasure of spending time at the first Forge Accelerator to be held in Autodesk’s Soho office (in central London). On Monday morning I headed to Geneva, and had a minor panic attack when I saw that so many London-bound flights had been cancelled. My own flight was delayed by about an hour, but only due to late arrival of the plane from Zurich. Nothing related to Storm Dennis, which came as a huge relief after having watched the viral Etihad A380 landing video. In fact it was nice and sunny when I finally arrived... Read more →

Persisting identifiers for objects in the Forge viewer

In Dasher we have some interesting functionality to isolate parts of the building by level. This is increasingly something you can do via “out of the box” Forge viewer functionality, but we’ve found a couple of reasons to go beyond that basic capability: Not all elements or objects are assigned to the correct level. Some elements – such as those belonging to the building facade or perhaps internal pipes – transcend levels, and so don’t behave well. It’s of course possible to split elements/objects that belong to the second category, but we tend to take the approach of allowing... Read more →

More data from the NEST building now available in Project Dasher

I’ve been heads-down this week on a couple of tasks related to Dasher: the first relates to working on the integration of a new timeline control. I’m hoping this will be ready for people to try in the coming weeks, but we’re not quite there yet. The second relates to bringing more data into our time-series back-end from the NEST building: I noticed last week that we were missing data from October of last year onwards. It turns out we had a credentials problem – we have a “conduit” that regularly federates the NEST data into our back-end, but... Read more →

Migrating custom Forge viewer shaders to WebGL 2 – Part 2

A few posts ago I mentioned some work was needed to migrate our Dasher 360 shaders to the latest version of the Forge viewer (or the one after it). This work is now complete, so I can share a few thoughts and comments on what was needed to make this happen. Before doing that, though, I need to thank Elias Cohenca for his invaluable help during this process: I can honestly say that without his help the migration would either not have happened or would remain a work in progress. Thanks, Elias! Firstly, it’s important to note that even... Read more →

Visiting post-Brexit, pre-AU London

After a couple of interesting days in Berlin, last week – which for now I’m not going to talk about in detail, maybe another time – I’ve come across to the UK. This is my first trip since the UK formally left the EU, even if it’s still part of the customs union for the remainder of the year. I feel very strongly that this is a bad thing for the country – and for the world – but there you go. There’s nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. Yesterday morning I headed to Battersea to visit... Read more →

Visiting NEST with Kingspan

On Wednesday I was back at the NEST building on Empa’s Dübendorf campus. I’ve posted about NEST lots of times over the last few years, but these are the main two tours in case you want to track its evolution. I was there to meet Brian Glancy – visiting from Kingspan in Ireland – and Reto Largo from NEST. NEST and Kingspan are two of the main ongoing pilots of Dasher, so it was great to get everyone in the same place to discuss possibilities. Reto started the tour in the media room in NEST, with it’s 16-screen media... Read more →

Join us for DevDays Online

Not everyone can make it to the Forge team’s annual DevCon events, so luckily they also run a set of online webinars covering similar content. Here’s a brief schedule of their upcoming webinars – for more specifics, please head on over to their blog post. Note that some of these webinars are only open to members of the Autodesk Developer Network (if they relate to our desktop products). All of the webinars are held at 8am PST (4pm GMT, 5pm CET, 11am EST), and will be recorded if the timing doesn’t work for you. Tuesday February 25 - DevDays... Read more →

Migrating custom Forge viewer shaders to WebGL 2 – Part 1

An interesting thing happened when I tried Dasher 360 with the latest production version of the Forge viewer: no sensor dots appeared. As Dasher without sensors is a glorified 3D viewer, this was a bit of a problem. Digging into things a little, I worked out that our custom WebGL shader wasn’t working properly in this latest version. At this point I reached out to my friend Elias Cohenca in Tel Aviv for a quick sanity check: he confirmed that this latest version of the Forge viewer is now defaulting to WebGL 2.0. This was confirmed in the Forge... Read more →

Walking on old wood

I was due to meet with a customer in Zurich on Monday of this week, but unfortunately it had to be rescheduled at fairly short notice. As I’d already bought a non-refundable train ticket – if you buy them a little in advance you can get a day ticket for the whole of Switzerland for less than a return ticket to Zurich, which can be very handy – I decided to head across to Zurich anyway. I used the morning for another meeting – luckily the person I wanted to catch up with was in the office – and... Read more →