W
hen you log into Au-
todesk's Project Show-
room, you see a 3D scene,
a fully rendered kitchen or bathroom. You
see light bouncing off the marble counter's
smooth surface. You see the sheen of the
polished wood-cabinet doors. It's the kind
of photo realistic rendering that would re-
quire an hour or more to produce, even
with a professional workstation or a super-
charged desktop. So you might be surprised
to fi nd that when you randomly choose a
diff erent tile for the fl oor or a new refrig-
erator from the material panel, the scene
updates in about fi ve seconds with the new
object, complete with raytracing eff ects.
at's because the CPU inside your lo-
cal machine is not shouldering the bulk of
the computing burden necessary to bring
the scene to life. You are, in essence, tap-
ping into the horsepower of a server farm
elsewhere, hosted by Autodesk and its part-
ners. As a result, you get to view a custom
3D scene without processing the complex
algorithms that defi ne your scene.
is mode of computing is sometimes
called cloud computing, a poetic descrip-
July 2009 42
Dragonfl y, a technology preview from Autodesk, delivers an online room-planning platform
through the use of cloud computing.
The move from desktop
to cloud computing makes
visualization affordable
By Kenneth Wong
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Visualization
