Frederic Loranger is one of our newer software developers at Autodesk Labs. He has worked on technologies like Project Freewheel. Frederic took the lead on manning our Scan/Modify/Print booth in the exhibit hall at Autodesk University. Frederic filed this report.
From getting 3D scans of skateboard trucks to measuring the diameters of wine barrels in Inventor, the questions were many at the Scan – Modify – Print booth. This booth demonstrated an Autodesk rapid prototyping workflow using two 3D laser scanners and a 3D printer. While the average person would think that "rapid" prototyping would be all about speed, they were surprised to hear that it took us half a day to reverse-engineer the existing mouse, a few hours to modify it in Inventor, and 10 hours to print it! “Not so rapid” a few did comment, but others thought the technology improved greatly since its inception in the late 1980’s. Just imagine if you had to build the prototype from scratch.
The reason Autodesk Labs investigates technologies like 3D scanning and 3D printing is that these devices and associated processes are improving very fast. The costs of these devices are coming down and their accuracy/ease of you are on the up swing. Autodesk wants to make sure that we are on top of these technologies and how they integrate with our current and future products. It is all about experiencing it before it is real. This is serious business.
The booth wasn't all business though. One sure way of getting people’s attention was to scan an Autodesk employee’s face with the MicroScan3D laser scanner. Scott reported on how we had scanned his face at the Labs office in San Rafael. In Las Vegas, I was one of the privileged since I, Frederic Loranger, recently joined Autodesk Labs as a Software Engineer to work on cool new technology. Our legal department advised us that it was not a good idea to shine a laser light into a customer's eyes. So we stuck to scanning employee faces. I hope you enjoyed all the technology previews, and I wish to see you next year.
Thanks Frederic. Fondly recalling our time at AU is alive in the lab.