20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
Would you like to win a airborne UAV or a underwater OpenROV submersible robot to go exploring with? You have the chance to with a recent Explore Science contest being held by Instructables and OpenExplorer. "Scientific breakthroughs make the world…
The past two days almost a thousand have attended the REAL 2015 event here in San Francisco California at the historic Fort Mason. The conference covered everything dealing with Capture Compute and Create. There was everything from laser scanning systems,…
Made In Space recently installed and setup up the AMF Zero-G 3D printer with NASA MSFC on the International Space Station (ISS), and you can get the rare opportunity to print on the same printer and see the one that…
We at Autodesk have now placed a cool 500 LED cube in the Autodesk Gallery. This cube was developed by an intern and responds with lighting up pulsating LED lights and effects to hashtags on Twitter. Huge thanks to the…
I love hiking and climbing the rugged, beautiful and high mountains of Utah and I also love research and fun with drones also known as UAV quad rotor copters. So last Thursday I decided to combine both for an epic sunset flight.
It is always amazing to stumble across computers from the distant past. I have two old vintage computers that I found while was cleaning out of my storage. They both actually boot up and run. The pair are an Apple…
At Autodesk University last week the winning team of the Autodesk Design & Make contest was selected by the audience as Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski couldn't reach a consensus on the winning team. The Design & Make contest was Autodesk employees using our Autodesk 360 product internally to collaborate and using Autodesk products to design and build a project in a short time. The finalists were shown all week at Autodesk University.
The Office of the CTO is trending all over the web and social media this week due to one announcement! Tuesday we made a joint announcement with Amazon, Mozilla and Otoy about Autodesk desktop applications running through the browser.
In short, we announced technology that lets customers fire up a Web browser, connect to an Amazon Web Services G2 instance, and run Autodesk Inventor, Revit, Maya and 3ds Max off the instance through the browser. Autodesk announced this under the brand umbrella of Autodesk Remote. Autodesk Remote is the name of the our remote computing initiative and it’s also the name of the PC-to-PC/iPad client that we launched earlier this year. The Amazon instance doesn’t have a brand name. Both are powered by OTOY’s ORBX encoder, with the distinction being that Autodesk Remote is peer-to-peer via the Autodesk Remote client; the Amazon instances are hosted and connect to any computer (PC, Mac or Linux) via the browser. ORBX.js is the javascript decoder. 30-day trials of Inventor, Revit, Max and Maya are pre-installed on the Amazon Instances.Your files can be stored on Autodesk 360, Dropbox, Google Drive, wherever you want.
I get to take it for a test drive!
Today and late into tonight I was delighted to be able to get my hands on this technology preview and run the four Autodesk applications over the web with nothing but HTML5 in a web browser.
Look ma, nothing to download, install, or plugins required!
That's' right there was no catch and nothing to download or install as stated I just fire up my web browser like Firefox and Chrome with HTML5 compatibility and ran full versions of Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Inventor, Maya, and Revit.
So how is this different from other remote access applications out there?
This technology allows hardware GPU acceleration and also since these Windows 2008 server machine instances are on the Amazon Web Servers along with modified Kepler Grid GPUs from Nvidia, I have one hell of a powerhouse machine that I can access anytime from almost any device. I can use Autodesk 3ds Max or Inventor from a MacBook Air. This my friends is what many with graphics hungry applications have been searching for, a scalable cloud GPU. The cloud based CPU cores have been around awhile now but those involved with graphics are more interested in GPUs and being able to use them in a cloud infrastructure where you can scale fast in a burst as needed unlike your local machine. I can just grab a new machine or device and fire up a HTML5 browser like Firefox and get to my desktop and run powerful applications without downloading or installing anything but a browser and also not sacrificing performance due to the local device hardware. I also wonder aloud if this will reduce the need for native platform applications if you can access them from most devices. For example I can run Revit on a Mac now without sacrificing performance.
I have noticed just testing today that the performance is about 30fps but the absolutely amazing part is the remote instance itself and how responsive it is in graphical operations like rendering and working with huge files.The remote machine instance actually renders frames in a test animation I ran about 4 times faster than my beefy local machine can.
Explore 3D scenes with your bare hands with the new Autodesk Maya 2014 plug-in, free at LeapMotion Airspace.
Google Glass Explorer Edition.jpegI just read that those who were originally Google blessed with a pair of Google Glasses in the Google Glass Explorer program might have received a special email to allow you to invite another person to spend $1500 on a pair of uber geek glasses. Google Opens Invites To Google Glass Explorer Program
I wanted to make a case (beg & plea) for you contacting me with that one special invitation to share. I would really love to use these to explore ways to share experiences with other such as exploring ways they could be used in construction and design technologies and take all my readers with me on all the trails I hike every week and those crazy travel experiences like the time I got my butt kicked by a kangaroo. Google Glass would also be awesome when you meet as many people as I do and help you remember all their names. Wearable computing devices are only get more and more prevalent and advanced and open many new exciting possibilities.
I know chances are better to hit the lottery as there is such a small number of Google Glass Explorers, but I had to at least ask. I would offer my first born child but he is now 22 years old and can be a bit cranky at times. So if you have one of those special Google Glass invites, lets talk.