It is Alive in the Lab

Project Showroom: Designing your bathroom like you design your shoes

Look at the athletic shoes that Senior Strategic Designer, Doug Look, created for Autodesk Labs:

Years ago when I was a DWF Technical Evangelist, I created a design for my own set of shoes using the colors from the DWF ball:

My son has several pair of these personalized shoes. At the start of the school year, he created a design for his Pinnacle High School basketball team, and all the players bought the same shoe. Though I never acted on purchasing a shoe with the garish DWF ball colors, I did wind up getting my own pair whose colors I chose to make them go with blue jeans. I had “Sheppard” as the personalization. I was involved in a pick-up game, and I was wearing my shoes. A guy I had never met looked down at my shoes, saw Sheppard, assumed it was some NBA player, and asked “Sheppard – who’s that?” I had to say “that’s me.” This type of “mass customization” works.

If you would like to see customization at work in terms of design elements, you can visit the Holophane site:

Dynamic Street Lamp Assembly

This site lets you select various elements to define a street lamp, combines these iParts into an assembly using Autodesk Inventor, publishes a 3D DWF, and lets you view the DWF. You can even see a rendering of your street lamp in a setting of your choosing. The Holophane solution also does an analysis of your resulting design and lets you know the wind speed your street lamp can withstand.

Another example of configuring design elements is Project Showroom:

Select Bathroom Upgrades

The site lets you select various elements to define a bathroom, combines these elements, and publishes a realistic view. The site keeps track of the additional costs as you make the bathroom fancier. :-)

So what's your experience with custom configurators? Please let us know what you think: Labs.showroom@autodesk.com. Just do it.

New Project Showroom Address

Project Showroom is one of our many solutions for design visualization. The scenario for this technology preview is a home builder who allows clients to customize their homes by selecting accessories. The clients can then see a realistic rendering [as well as the additional cost :-)] of their home based on the choices they have made. To solicit your feedback, we have provided a sample for configuring a bathroom.

The old web address for Project Freewheel was http://dwfit.com. The current web address is http://freewheel.labs.autodesk.com. The old web address for Project Showroom was http://showroom.dwfit.com. The new web address is http://showroom.labs.autodesk.com. See the pattern? We're moving away from the dwfit.com domain to our Autodesk Labs domain. For those who have bookmarked links to Project Showroom, your existing bookmarks will continue to work for now.

Updated Project Showroom Now Available

Though we routinely update Project Showroom servers to provide a more robust and reliable environment, we recently made some updates that have customer facing effects. In our latest build of the service we included:

• Due to popular demand, the servers now decline sessions when new sessions would cause resource exhaustion. This provides a better user experience for those already in the process of using Project Showroom. (If you wish to be kind, end your browser session when you have finished investigating Project Showroom. This lets the server know you are done to allow others to take their turns quicker than timing out.)
• There is a new ‘reset to default view’ button in the event users get lost while navigating around in 3D.
• To help people from getting lost, the Zoom Out button is limited to no more than default field of view.
• Each item in the Select Accessories list has a button on the right side. If the Accessory is not in the scene but can be added, the button says Add>. If the Accessory is already in the scene, the button says <Remove. Clicking the button adds or removes the accessory.
• When you click on an object in the scene, there is now a button in the Selection for <Remove. Clicking the button removes the accessory.
• When you add an accessory whose alternative is already present, the server swaps one accessory for the other. The Add> and <Remove buttons change to reflect this modification.
• A Project Showroom discussion group hyperlink tab appears in the upper right alongside About and Return to Autodesk Labs.
• By popular demand, the small orbit preview screen appears in the center of the scene.
• Tooltips are included with some helpful hints or explanations when a user hovers over the following areas: (a) Select Upgrades tab; (b) Upgrades Selected bar; (c) Select Accessories tab; (d) Accessory Gift Certificate bar.
• Navigation buttons are inactive, i.e., grayed out, to indicate that they are not applicable in the following instances (a) Zoom Out: whenever the field of view is already at the default and (b) Fit: whenever the field of view is already at the default
• Texture mapping for countertops was improved to produce better quality images.

So check it out. Updating services to provide better software is alive in the lab.

Project Showroom is like some high school students - wildly popular

Response to Project Showroom has been wildly greater than anticipated. I am not exaggerating. People love this concept. So many people are "playing with the knobs," don't be surprised if you see a message of the form:

Demonstrating the ability to configure real world models with realistic rendering is way alive in the lab.

Showroom: As easy as clicking and dragging/dropping

The response to Project Showroom has been almost overwhelming. End users and manufacturers both see the potential for this type of technology. Here's a YouTube video that shows just how easy it is to use.

So play with the knobs. Check it out. Please tell us what you think: Labs.showroom@autodesk.com. Demonstrating the ability to configure real world models with realistic rendering is alive in the lab.

Simpsons Avatar and Project Showroom: same idea

This Simpsons avatar thing is really catching on. At first I portrayed myself in fun. I was disappointed in how generic the result was, so I picked Shaan Hurley because he had glasses and facial hair - something distinct. The default body type was that of Homer's and I couldn't resist. It is amazing how easy it is to make friends by trying this. Chris Blocher loved what I had done for Shaan and submitted one of himself. Several other CAD bloggers did something similar:

• Humor: Scott Sheppard Simpson
• Shaan Hurley Simpson'ized
• Autodesk University Blog: Joseph Wurcher Simpson
• BLAUGI: Mike Perry Simpson (weekend fun)
• Mistress of the Dorkness: Melanie Stone Perry Simpson
• RobiNZ CAD Blog: Robin Capper Simpson
• Through the Interface: Kean Walmsley Simpson

Some bloggers were like me and did it for fun. Others figured they had better portray themselves before someone else did it for them. :-)

If you think about it, most bloggers are not professional cartoonists. Okay - Scott Adams is an exception. Many of us do not even know how to draw. Despite this, we were all able to create characters in the Simpsons style. Not all characters are as accurate as my rendition of Shaan Hurley :-), but they all certainly reflect the Simpsons style and an approximation of the person being avatar'd. This is made possible by allowing us to mix and match from a set of predefined alternatives.

Mixing and matching is exactly what Project Showroom is doing. Instead of a Simpsons avatar, you wind up with a bathroom that is comprised of real upgrades and additions that you can buy. Most customers are not professional bathroom designers. Web services are all about giving users choices and using computing power to bring them together.

Even when we're having silly fun, we're recognizing new interface approaches in the lab. So what do you think about Project Showroom? Please tell us: Labs.showroom@autodesk.com.

Project Showroom Now Available

Experience it before it's real - that's our company motto. Towards this end Autodesk Labs is happy to share a technology preview that demonstrates the concept. It's called Project Showroom.

http://showroom.labs.autodesk.com

Showroom is another one of our many solutions for design visualization. The scenario for this technology preview is a home builder who allows clients to customize their homes by selecting accessories. The clients can then see a realistic rendering [as well as the additional cost :-)] of their home based on the choices they have made. To solicit your feedback, we have provided a sample for configuring a bathroom. You can start with something like this:

and end up with something like this:

As it says on the project Showroom home page "Click on a part to explore the possibilities." So check out Project Showroom. It's fun.