For the last year and a half I’ve been reporting into an Autodesk Research team based mainly in Toronto, so it made sense to include that city in the itinerary of our round-the-world tour. This did mean, however, that almost inevitably my wife and kids would be left alone for the majority of our time in the city, while I spent time with colleagues. I’m part of the Complex Systems Research group, run by Azam Khan. It’s an impressive group – many have PhDs, a few of us do not – so it’s always an education for me to... Read more →
July 14, 2017
July 12, 2017
Displaying a round-the-world itinerary using Google Maps – Part 4
In the first parts of this series we saw a basic, embedded map and then added information windows and labels. In this post we’re going to overlay data being recorded by a tracking device to show our progress in real-time. This was made pretty easy thanks to Garmin’s MapShare service: our Iridium-connected inReach Explorer+ device publishes tracking information automagically to our MapShare page, which has a KML feed that can be embedded as an overlay on Google Maps. The additional code, below, is trivial. It’s possible to zoom into the location of the latest data on map load, but... Read more →
|
|
|
July 10, 2017
Old friends and Pinball Bob
Several people have looked at our trip’s itinerary and have reacted in a similar way: Washington DC New York West Hartford Toronto … “Wait a minute… why on earth are you going to West Hartford?” It boils down to this: one of my closest friends lives there. Duncan and I met during our first week or so at University – we played field hockey together – and ended up becoming very good friends: we lived in a shared house during our 2nd year at Uni, for instance. We’ve stayed in touch ever since, visiting each other in the US,... Read more →
|
|
|
July 06, 2017
The first few days of our big trip
So far our big trip has gone well: the trip out via the UK went smoothly – we had a 5-hour layover at Heathrow Terminal 5, as we had to collect and re-check our bags (our ticket from Geneva was separate from the main round-the-world itinerary, it seems) – but time passes quickly in a pub when you’re eating fish and chips and sipping Guinness. Arrivals in DC were also a breeze: I’d forgotten about having to take mobile lounges at Dulles, but immigration was quick and easy. We booked an UberXL (we’re 5 people with lots of bags)... Read more →
|
|
|
July 03, 2017
Displaying a round-the-world itinerary using Google Maps – Part 3
After creating a basic map for our round-the-world itinerary and then adding photos when placemarkers are clicked, today we’re going to add some handy labels to the map to show rough dates for when we’ll be arriving in a particular location. This actually proved trickier than expected: there’s an old library called MapLabel that works well with the Google Maps API, but it doesn’t load asynchronously in a straightforward way. So I had to jump through some hoops to load it only when the main Google Maps API is available, avoiding some irritating load errors. I used some code... Read more →
|
|
|
June 30, 2017
Displaying a round-the-world itinerary using Google Maps – Part 2
In the last post we looked at a basic implementation of a round-the-world itinerary in Google Maps. In today’s post we’re going to add the ability to see the first photo associated with a location when you click on it. The Google Maps API makes it fairly easy to get the photos associated with a particular place, but it helps to identify that place uniquely: while you can search for a place based on its name, it’s more efficient and reliable to get its unique “place ID” and use that instead. I used this handy PlaceD Finder tool to... Read more →
|
|
|
June 28, 2017
Displaying a round-the-world itinerary using Google Maps – Part 1
Over the next few posts I’m going to talk about the process I went through to integrate the itinerary for our imminent round-the-world trip into the awesome web-site my wife has set up. The initial approach I took was to use Google My Maps: this is a really cool tool for creating a custom map without any coding needed (yes, I know – that doesn’t sound like much fun :-). For instance, you can set up your placemarks and link them with a route, and when individual places are clicked it shows a nice sliding info panel. I started... Read more →
|
|
|
June 26, 2017
Meet the Walmsleys
It’s now less than a week before my family and I get on a plane and start our big trip: visiting 13 countries on 5 continents (not including the one we’re starting from) over the course of 6 months. We leave on July 2nd, 2017, and – if our plans don’t change – will return home on January 5th, 2018. Here’s a map of where we’re going… be sure to zoom into different locations and click on the place-markers to bring up additional information. It’s been a deliberate choice, over the years, not to talk much about my family... Read more →
|
|
|
June 22, 2017
Integrating the 3dRudder with AutoCAD
I mentioned this device, late last year, and have been meaning to spend time integrating it into AutoCAD ever since. The 3dRudder is an interesting perpheral: while currently targeted at helping seated VR users navigate intuitively in 3D – effectively keeping their hands free – it was originally intended for CAD users. So it’s nice that it’s going back to its roots, as it were. Here’s an excerpt of a video of Christian Slater demoing the 3dRudder integration with Rhino (I’m kidding about it being Christian Slater – he just looks a bit like him :-). Over the last... Read more →
|
|
|
June 20, 2017
A new era at Autodesk
As John Walker once said, many years ago, Autodesk does not change CEO very often: during the first decade of the company’s history, only two people had the role. Like a lot of things John said back then, it turned out to be impressively predictive of the future: during the following 25 years we had just two more! Here’s the list: John Walker, 1982-1986 Al Green, 1986-1992 Carol Bartz, 1992-2006 Carl Bass, 2006-2017 Andrew Anagnost, 2017-… As you can see from the last item, the search for our new CEO has ended: after some months during which Andrew and... Read more →
|
|
|
June 16, 2017
Forge and AWS: tell us what you need!
For most of the week – while at the Forge Accelerator in Barcelona – I sat next to an acquaintance (I’m happy to now call a friend) from Amazon Web Services: Tom “Elvis” Jones. Tom is a solution architect at AWS and has been to a number of Forge-related events over the last year or so. Autodesk has tightened its relationship with AWS in recent years, one of the reasons for Tom’s presence at Forge events. From talking to Tom, it’s clear he’s interested in helping Forge developers get started more quickly with the AWS platform, something that’s going... Read more →
|
|
|
June 12, 2017
Football and Forge in Barcelona
As always, the annual football tournament – this time in Barcelona – was a complete blast. The Neuchatel team was as strong as it’s ever been, in my opinion, and played really well. We were in a tough group (yes, the proverbial “group of death”), but managed to qualify for the knock-out stage with 3 wins, 2 draws and a loss. The weather was scorching… a beautiful early summer’s day. We had a few great games in the knock-out phase, eventually losing (again) in the quarter final on penalties to the UK team (who went on to win the... Read more →
|
|
|
June 09, 2017
How healthy is Forge?
Autodesk has maintained a health dashboard for its cloud products for quite some time. The good news for Forge developers is that – just in time for next week’s Accelerator in Barcelona – Forge has been added as a line item: Given the internal response to the technical issues we experienced during the last Accelerator I attended in Munich, I’m pretty sure we’ll be green through the week in Barcelona. Let’s hope so, anyway! One great feature of the dashboard is the ability to subscribe to notifications: once you’ve signed in you’ll have the option to do so via... Read more →
|
|
|
June 08, 2017
Autodesk is seeking a Senior Evangelist for AR/VR
There’s a very interesting job posting that I wanted to highlight for readers of this blog: Autodesk’s Immersive Experiences Group (IXG) is seeking a Senior Evangelist for Augmented and Virtual Reality. IXG is a fairly recently named group at Autodesk: I’m curious about the choice of the term Immersive, as my understanding is that the organisation’s mandate is very much also about Augmented and Mixed Reality, which for me is more contextual than immersive. But frankly that’s a minor detail: IXG does have a nice ring to it, and we do love our TLAs at Autodesk. Here’s an excerpt... Read more →
|
|
|
June 06, 2017
3D & Mixed Reality at Microsoft House
OK, so that was perhaps a little mad. Earlier today I spent 5 hours on the train – going from Neuchatel to Zurich and then on the new SBB service via the Gotthard Base Tunnel – to get to Milan, had a coffee with my uncle (who lives and works nearby), gave a 30-minute presentation on Forge and AR/VR at a Meetup, and then spent 4.5 hours on more trains – this time going towards Geneva on the EuroCity (formerly Cisalpino), and then changing at Brig to head via Bern – to get home. This was the main train... Read more →
|
|
|
June 02, 2017
Coming to Milan for a Mixed Reality Meetup
On Tuesday, I’ll be travelling to Milan and back (on the same day, by train) to present at a “3D / Mixed Reality” Meetup hosted at the beautiful new Microsoft House, headquarters of Microsoft Italia. I’ll be talking about Forge and AR/VR, and I’ll no doubt include a Dancing Robot or two, I expect. It’s pretty cool to be visiting Microsoft House: it was designed by Swiss architect Herzog & De Meuron (a good customer of Autodesk’s who I visited earlier this year in Basel) and it looks absolutely stunning. Many thanks to Giorgio Mazzucchelli for extending the invitation... Read more →
|
|
|
May 30, 2017
BIM Thoughts podcast on Dasher 360
I was asked recently by Bill Debevc to talk about Dasher 360 during an interview for the BIM Thoughts podcast series. It was certainly fun chatting about the project with Bill. I’m happy to see that the podcast is now live on the BIM Thoughts site. Enjoy! Read more →
|
|
|
May 24, 2017
Equipment
Most of my team has been 100% focused on an event taking place in Toronto, this week, the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (or SimAUD). This is a really interesting conference for people working in our space: I’m looking forward to attending myself, at some point. As the only non-Toronto based member of the team, it made sense for me to skip it (and given the fact I’m about to embark on a 6-month trip – including some time in Toronto – I didn’t even suggest that I attend). This meant that I ended up spending... Read more →
|
|
|
May 19, 2017
Sensor filtering and animated surface shading in Dasher 360
We’ve been busy working on a number of interesting features for Dasher 360 over the last few weeks. The main focus – at least from my side – has been to extend the filtering capability to allow people to filter sensors based on type and their location in the model. Not only that, but the filtering is reflected in realtime in the list of sensors, even when highlighting different areas of the model via the site’s breadcrumbs. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be viable – mainly for performance reasons – but for now it seems to... Read more →
|
|
|
May 15, 2017
The last few days to submit your Forge DevCon class proposal
We’re now in the last few days before the AU2017 – and Forge DevCon 2017 – CFP deadline on May 17th, 2017. Submit your class today! I’m particularly interested in your proposals related to Virtual, Mixed or Augmented Reality: despite not being able to attend the event, myself, I’m still running the AR/VR track. So – if you have a cool project that involves software development for AR/VR, ideally involving the Forge platform in some way – then submit your proposal with “Software Development” as a relevant topic and “Forge DevCon” as a pre-conference event. I’ll be involved in... Read more →
|
|
|
Kean Walmsley
Search
Categories
- 3D printing
- 3ds Max
- AJAX
- Android
- Annotation scaling
- Arduino
- ASP.NET
- Async
- AU
- Augmented Reality
- AutoCAD
- AutoCAD .NET
- AutoCAD I/O
- AutoCAD OEM
- Autodesk
- Autodesk App Store
- Autodesk Research
- AutoLISP / Visual LISP
- Azure
- Batch processing
- Blocks
- Books
- Civil 3D
- Commands
- Concurrent programming
- Conferences
- Core Console
- Custom objects
- Database
- Debugging
- Design
- DesignScript
- DevCasts
- DevTV
- Dimensions
- Documents
- Draw order
- Drawing structure
- DWF
- Dynamic
- Dynamic Blocks
- Dynamo
- Excel
- F#
- Fields
- Forge
- Fractals
- Freewheel
- Games
- Generative design
- Geo-location
- Geometry
- Graphics system
- Hatches
- HoloLens
- HTML
- Installation
- Instructables
- Interviews
- Inventor
- iOS
- IoT
- IronPython
- IronRuby
- Java
- JavaScript
- Jigs
- JSON
- Kinect
- Leap Motion
- LINQ
- Mac
- Mobile
- Morgan
- Netduino
- Notification / Events
- Object properties
- ObjectARX
- Overrules
- PaaS
- Personal
- Plotting
- Plugin of the Month
- Point clouds
- PowerShell
- Purge
- Python
- Raspberry Pi
- RealDWG
- Reality capture
- REST
- Retro computing
- Revit
- Robotics
- Round the world
- Ruby
- Runtime
- SaaS
- Security
- Selection
- Social media
- Solid modeling
- Stingray
- Tables
- Tinkercad
- Training
- Transactions
- Translation
- Travel
- UAVs
- Unity3D
- User interface
- Virtual Reality
- Visual Basic & VBA
- Visual Studio
- Web/Tech
- Weblogs
- WinRT
- WPF
- XML
Recent Posts
- Toronto
- Displaying a round-the-world itinerary using Google Maps Part 4
- Old friends and Pinball Bob
- The first few days of our big trip
- Displaying a round-the-world itinerary using Google Maps Part 3
- Displaying a round-the-world itinerary using Google Maps Part 2
- Displaying a round-the-world itinerary using Google Maps Part 1
- Meet the Walmsleys
- Integrating the 3dRudder with AutoCAD
- A new era at Autodesk
