As we wind down AU 2015 in Vegas, we just wanted to spend a moment talking about the Exhibit Hall. It’s where we ate, it’s where we networked, and it’s where we went to get our minds blown with the latest products, trends, and innovations. With over 160 Autodesk-authorized developers, solution providers, and partners on the floor, it was a feast for the mind.
Here are some of the big trends we noted:
- Generative Design. You could see it at work in the development of the Bandito Bros. new car, you could see it in components for a new bike, you could see it in the development of medical implants: computers solving design problems. With generative design, instead getting the computer’s help to bring to life a human-created design, the human tells the computer what problems to solve for, what the goals and constraints are for the task, and lets the software do the work. The result is generally something no human would ever design—very few straight lines. Autodesk Dreamcatcher is leading way in this arena.
- Sensors, baby. As the Internet of Things continues to expand, we’re finding ways to put more and more sensors into more and more places. The result, when desired, gets close to a neural system. And when measurements from those sensors are fed back into a generative design system, it can be used to create a self-improving design cycle, where the computer can measure its own progress in achieving the goals set out for it, then try to do better with the next iteration.
- 3D printing/additive manufacturing. The 3D printing wave continues to build. After all, how else are you going to produce the zany generative designs that Dreamcatcher comes up with? At the e-NABLE booth, attendees helped assemble 3D-printed hands to give kids born without fully formed hands a simple, inexpensive way to grab and hold things. And with the Spark platform, Autodesk is establishing an open platform to unify 3D printing design and production with APIs for each stage of the workflow.
- Reality computing. Using video, photos, laser scanning, SONAR, and more, we can now capture the details of real-world objects (whether that might be a building, a landscape, a simple statue, or a sunken ship) and then create digital models of those objects. And once we have that, it’s off to the races.
- Our robot friends. There was a robot mixing drinks. There were robots weaving in collaboration with humans. There were robots drilling metal. (Of them, our favorite may have been the one mixing drinks). But whatever your preference, there were robots around in the Exhibit Hall, showing how innovation is making them safer for human interaction and simpler to program. The Universal Robots that were used in the Hive installation had a booth where they were demonstrating how easy it was to teach their robots how to move – just position the arm correctly, tell the robot to remember that position, then move it to the next position and repeat. Easy-peasy.
- Live Design. At the Design Visualization LIVE booth, attendees could take a virtual reality tour of a San Francisco penthouse apartment just by putting on the headset and headphones. Driven by Autodesk Stingray, it’s the future of architectural visualization.
That’s just a taste of what the Exhibit Hall had to offer. If you were there, hope you were able to see it all first-hand. And if you weren’t, well, maybe next year!
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