President of AECCafe Sanjay Gangal spoke recently with Montreal-based Nick Fonta, General Manager, XR division at Autodesk about Autodesk’s XR immersive experience and the company’s acquisition of The Wild, an immersive remote collaboration platform for architecture, design, and enterprise teams.
Sanjay: Thank you so much for joining us, Nick. So, tell us about Autodesk XR Solutions.
Nick: For sure. Autodesk has an interesting journey or history when it comes to XR. We started in the 1990s with our first project around XR, and it was a full 3D immersive experience with AutoCAD data that people could navigate into, a little bit like a first-person shooter. You could interact with basic interactions with the AutoCAD scene at the time. That was a project in prototype. And since then, we’ve been doing a lot of things, we have a research group who continued testing the limits of those technologies, but more recently, we’ve had a few things maybe worth noting. The first thing being about seven years ago, we moved into the real-time engine business, if you will, with our own engine, which was called Stingray. And we also built a first product in our trying to understand what that meant phase for Autodesk, and the product was called Revit Live. And both Stingray and Revit Live were our first real experiments to try to understand how real-time technologies, VR, and AR can can add value and solve real problems for our customers in the AEC and manufacturing spaces.
We tried a lot of things there, and then finally, a lot more recently, we have products today that support mostly VR, a little bit of AR as well in a portfolio. We have VRED, which targets mainly the automotive industry. VRED is a very high end, high resolution, high level of fidelity when it comes to imageries and rendering. It comes with the collaborative VR experience, so you can bring multiple designers to review, do the design reviews typically on cars, but it’s also used in other manufacturing industries. So that’s one, as a product, it’s been around for about five years, maybe a bit more, and is still around. It’s very successful, we’re seeing a lot of adoption and growth there, and we also have a capability called Create VR that allows designers to sketch and ideate in VR from scratch in a 3D space for a very creative way of transferring your ideas as a designer into the 3D world. Recently we released a capability out of Fusion products, one of our Hero products in manufacturing that allows any Fusion model to be experienced in AR, experienced on iOS with a publish to a USDZ. This is what we have today. This is where this all journey started, maybe a couple of months ago, and I’m sure we’re going to talk more about that now.
This week at Autodesk University 2021 (Virtual) IMAGINiT Technologies showed off their new task automation Space Programming Module add-on for IMAGINiT Clarity that tackles common space planning challenges that firms face on complex architectural projects. In addition to this optional, add-on module, the new 2022.1 version of IMAGINiT Clarity also now features a variety of tools that enhance integrations and model metrics for Autodesk Revit and AutoCAD users.
IMAGINiT Technologies has recently released Clarity 2022, an enterprise level suite of products that improves building information model (BIM) integrity and collaboration via access to business insights, metrics and time saving automation. New functionality inIMAGINiT Clarity’s 2022 release has added Autodesk AutoCAD task processing, extending to Autodesk Revit teams as well as AutoCAD and Autodesk Civil 3D users in AEC Firms.
More customers working remotely coupled with increased frequency in cyberthreats over 2020 has spurred the release of IMAGINiT Technologies Clarity 2021.1 suite of products including new security features.
In the recent panel discussion hosted by IMAGINiT entitled “Mitigating Risk in Construction,” as part of the company’s “BIM and Digital Construction” series, panelists Norman Akin, Senior Applications expert, with a background in architectural construction and manufacturing applications, and Jim Stoneberger, Solutions Consultant for IMAGINiT, with a background in architecture and construction, joined moderator Joe Eichenseer, director of Building Lifecycle Solutions, to discuss this timely topic.
In a conversation this week with Bob Mayer, president of IMSI Design, he spoke about the recent release of their TurboCAD 2020 line, including Platinum, Professional, Deluxe and Designer versions for Windows® desktop PCs. The new release sports added functionality for 2D and 3D for all users with over 40 new and improved features.
“This year’s 2020 release, puts a greater emphasis of 3D modeling and manufacturing enhancements,” stated Mayer. “There are powerful enhancements to our Facet Editor, new 3D Covering functionality, 3D Printing improvement, an updated solid modeling engine, and other productivity enhancements. We are particularly pleased with how much faster TurboCAD handles complex objects and files, constraint animation, and with the new support of advanced mechanical CAD file formats in our Platinum edition.”
In 2019, it came to my attention that there was more specific attention being paid to AEC and GIS integration, specifically two partnerships of AEC companies formed with Esri. Esri’s Kathleen Kewley discussed the resurgence of interest of GIS in the AEC space from an Esri perspective. Kewley also worked at Autodesk at one time. In addition I have included information from a webinar conducted by Autodesk senior technical marketing manager Wes Newman and AEC Solutions engineer from Esri, Rafael Fernandes, about the partnership between Esri and Autodesk.
Recently, AECCafe Voice conducted interviews with Peter Costanza, director Facilities Management, Carl Storms, senior applications expert, and Matt Mason, director of Software Solutions from IMAGINiT about the latest developments for their company and what was talked about at Autodesk University 2019.
APEX – client: Biomed Realty Trust Inc., architect: Perkins and Will
We’re coming down the home stretch with our AECCafe Industry Predictions. The last of a series of editorial articles on this topic will be published the last week of January. Deadline for entries is January 20th. This article is the third installment of those articles.
Please keep your submission to 200-1,000 words, with author’s name, email address, photo and a short bio. Susan.smith@ibsystems.com
