Project Showroom 1.0.16 Now Available

This is not a photograph. It is a rendering of a 3D scene. Click to enlarge.

Project Showroom is a technology preview that establishes a vision for a service for home furnishing suppliers to enable their customers to visualize their products in real-life room settings. It is our software as a service approach to kitchen design software and bathroom design software. Whereas Project Dragonfly lets you sketch out your own room with Simms-like renderings, Project Showroom lets you drag and drop purchasable objects and see photorealistic results.

Project Showroom 1.0.16 is now available. As the numbering implies, this is our sixteenth update of Project Showroom. I updated the servers on Thursday. You can check it out at:

Project Showroom Site Page

Like the previous release, this release was a minor update with changes "under the hood." Think of it like a service pack, but you do not need to download and install anything. Once again - the beauty of software as a service.

1. Function versus Form
   We continue to make progress on separating out styling from functionality. This will allow Project Showroom to show up in other forms and have the look and feel of where it's found.

2. Robust Error Detection and Recovery
   We applied additional defensive programming techniques to handle the occasional hiccup that can occur in any web-based application. By all means, please let us know at labs.showroom@autodesk.com if you ever see:
   

3. New Environment
   We outgrew our data center in San Francisco. Project Showroom is now housed and monitored in the same data center as Buzzsaw and Constructware.

4. Find Your Center
   The Project Showroom site is now centered on the HTML page. Thanks to Product Designer, Mark Andersen, for the improvement. Mark is always looking for ways to improve the user experience for Autodesk customers. You can make suggestions via labs.showroom@autodesk.com.

5. Seek is Where Our Heart Is
   With this release, the process for getting content into Project Showroom is now more closely aligned with the process used to submit to Autodesk Seek. In fact, Project Showroom uses a Seek database to find the list of rooms available and what is available in each room. At Autodesk, the left hand does know what the right hand is doing. Thanks to the Seek team for working with us on this.

6. Let's get Viral
   When we added a watermark to Project Freewheel, we found that usage went up. It helped spread the word. So we did the same thing for Project Showroom. An inconspicuous watermark appears in the lower right - much like what you see on Google Maps.

Developing Project Showroom at a fast and furious pace is alive in the lab.