20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
This weekend I was doing things and started getting emails, tweets, and Facebook posts that I was on NPR. Back in March I was at the 123D event in New York City with many of our patterns and a gentleman approached me to discuss 123D and 123D Catch and the technologies possible uses. Turns out this gentlemen was from NPR and just published his story and interview edited clips.
In this months June 2012 Smithsonian Magazine there is a great article involving Reality Capture by Smithsonian curator Nicholas D. Pyenson Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals where you capture an existing object in a digital form such as a 3D mesh or point cloud. The article is “Save the Whale Bones – Laser scans record fossils” on page 84 of this issue and online at How Two Laser Cowboys-Saved The Day “http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/How-Two-Laser-Cowboys-Saved-The-Day.html”. The article details a unique archeological dig in Chile that was a collection of ancient whales located in the desert where a highway was going to be constructed, so time was of the essence to preserve this scientific anomaly of a group of full whale fossils in a land location
Last month myself and Gonzales Martinez spent a few weeks in Kenya with Dr, Louise Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute and Yang Deming of the National Museum of Kenya. We were researching several aspects of aerial photography and from a remote controlled copter to not only capture video and photos by map and locate areas of interest for fossil artifacts. We were in the Northern most part of Kenya in the Lake Turkana basin where the earliest evidence of man has been discovered over the years including several skulls dating back millions of years. Gonzalo has taken some of our video from both my camera and the onboard Octo-Copter video as well as photos and posted the video for everyone to enjoy.
If you create and edit training videos, screen recordings, demonstrations and product launch videos or more then you have most likely used Camtasia like we do here at Autodesk. I had also converted so many people I know in blogging to this products once they seen how powerful it was. After 7 releases of Camtasia as a user myself my longtime friends at TechSmith decided it was time to re-write the entire architecture of the Camtasia product to provide even more features and a more modern software base to build much more cool and amazing features on top of.
During the course of today (and throughout the week) you’ll likely hear us at Autodesk talking about the latest deployment of Autodesk 360 and Autodesk BIM 360. If you’re familiar with the notion of cloud based services, then Autodesk 360 will be a natural way to extend your designs beyond your local desktop. The power of Autodesk 360 starts to compound when you consider that mobile access means that I could collaborate on this new tower concept design while I was making new friends in Kenya.
Our wildly creative 3D mad scientist friends at MakerBot recently gathered a group of artists and captured several objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in a Hackathon event using Autodesk’s own 123D Catch which is free and available to use on your PC, your iPad or on the web. They were then able to create 3D prints from their MakerBot 3D printers as well they posted many on the Thingiverse for everyone to mod or print.
To sum it up in one word “Amazing” would be appropriate. I will be posting more on what we did in Kenya and the experience including a couple crazy travel stories over the next couple of weeks. As I review and edit my 6000+ photos, I will be uploading many of them to my Flickr photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/btl/.
Jambo!
Gonzalo Martinez and myself (Shaan Hurley) are currently in the extremely remote Turkana Basin of Kenya where many of the hominin fossils (our human ancestors) were found along with a great deal of other fossils and tools. We are researching aerial video and photo capture with Louise Leakey using a state of the art eight bladed remote copter mounted with lots of high tech equipment and cameras that we have named the Autodesk Octo-Copter for many exciting potential uses.
The long awaited app Autodesk SketchBook Ink for the iPad has just launched in the Apple App store at an introductory price of $1.99. It took a couple weeks longer than we had expected, but we took the time to make sure it was the best possible experience rather than just shipping it end of April as it was announced and shown on the Apple iPad 3 main stage launch.
Like good wine, you do not want to ship it until it is ready.
If you go to the middle of nowhere in East Africa, go North, and turn right, then drive another couple hours in the blazing heat, you will be where I am. Gonzalo Martinez and myself of Autodesk are capturing…