Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/9706
n n n n Trends & Technologies product. At the end of the day, our main goal is to make a tool that works for our customers. If we make something valuable for them, how can you really lose with that? How do you deem a technology good enough to graduate out of Labs? Each technology is different. Once Labs has gotten rid of some of the technology speed bumps, and when our engineers say the tech- nology has legs, and when our customers show interest, then product teams often say, ‘Hey, I want to own that.’ Tat’s when we graduate it and hand it off. Some technologies never make it and are killed either because the proto- type didn’t work as desired, or customers were disinterested. Failures are part of the process: By getting user feedback early, we can free up engineering resources for new projects that show more promise. Our users also pitch ideas. Tey usually Labs. A lot of the time these technologies be- come a feature in existing products. Some of the translators and analysis tools have shown up in Inventor, Revit, and AutoCAD. Some have become their own product, like Inventor LT. Still others we have walked away from for a number of reasons. For instance, three years ago the picture-based visual product search concept was interesting but the technology wasn’t ready, and we withdrew it from the site. What are some of the technologies with great potential? Inventor Fusion, which is the idea of re- envisioning what Inventor looks like if you do history-free modeling. You have direct ma- nipulation. You can grab your model, like a hole, and drag it and make it bigger without having to go into the parametric recipe. It is a lot simpler and has a much easier learning curve. Unlike other history-free modeling sys- tions. A CAD group can design the chair you are sitting in, but the technical publications department makes assembly instructions. Now with Inventor Publisher, a manufacturer can take the CAD model and augment it with other information and help publish the data in an interactive way to its customers on the Web or even an iPhone. What about Twitch? Tat is one project we have been working on for years. We saw the promise a long time ago when we did Project Freewheel. When you look at SaaS applications like Google Mail or others, they are a compromise when com- pared to their desktop equivalents. You can’t really do 3D graphics on the Web with current standards. So we thought about how far we could push 3D over the Web. Freewheel was a zero client; you didn’t have to install anything because it was purely HTML. We were able to want a new feature in a product they already have. It’s rare that they come up with a brand- new invention of how to apply technology. Our customers usually innovate in their own fields, like bridge building or airplane manu- facturing, so they bring deep domain expertise that augments the software development skills we have. Te advantage of a large community is that there are always people who know more than you about something. How long does it take to graduate a prod- uct from Labs? We’ve only been around for three and a half years, but if you go to the Labs Web site, there are dozens of technologies that have been built over that period, and there is a page that shows all the technologies that have graduated from 28 April 2010 While the goal of Autodesk Labs is to graduate a technology, not every one of them finds its way into a product. Above are images from Inventor Fusion, a history-free modeling concept. tems, with this one you get the best of both worlds since it automatically synchronizes a parametric recipe, which is technologically complicated. Many people said it was impos- sible or very, very difficult. It’s currently not production-perfect, but amazingly close, and that’s why it is in Labs. Another technology was launched at this past AU, Inventor Publisher. Tis is a stand- alone technology preview. We have Inventor (for doing product design) and Design Review (that allows people to review, mark up, and play assembly animations of what the prod- uct looks like), but customers told us they still needed an easy-to-use tool that helps them cre- ate clear and comprehensive technical instruc- do 10 frames per second of full-screen graph- ics on entire cities because we would render on the server; in doing so, we did some tricks with JPEGs and sent them down to a browser or smart phone, where we found we could do some simplified 3D over the Web. We then started doing complex user interfaces. When we saw what we could do, we thought, What would CAD look like on the Web? You would want perfect fidelity, zero latency, and high performance. Project Twitch came out of that. We investigated a lot of technologies in this space that just fell a bit short. So while we had the concept for a long time, it is only recently that the technology is ready. Tink of Twitch as a 1000-mile-long VGA