Project Showroom is a technology preview for Autodesk's vision of a new web-based home decorating tool. It allows you to browse product selections from leading manufacturers, and get a feel for how those products will look in real-world settings. If you clear your browser cache, you can try it out for yourself at:
On Friday I pushed a new build of the service to our servers. This is release 1.0.10. It's hard to believe we have released 10 times since July. This release contains:
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New Toolbar
This toolbar allows you to View more rooms, Save this room, Share room by email, and List the contents of a room.- Switching to a new room used to be incorporated as one of the tabs in the "mini-browser."
Based on your feedback, we've pulled it out of there. It's now it's own button.
- New in this release is the ability to save a room. You use your Autodesk consolidated login to keep track of the rooms you create by selecting the appliances, fixtures, flooring, counters, cabinets, and walls that you like. Rooms that you create and save (using a name you enter) appear with a HEART in their thumbnails when you view more rooms.
- Once you create a room that suites your tastes, you can email a link to a friend, and get feedback on your choices.
An email reply of "You have got to be kidding me." is probably not a good sign, - New in this release is the ability to list the contents of a room. Based on what a room allows you to change, this shows you all of the choices you have made in one easy pop up.
- Switching to a new room used to be incorporated as one of the tabs in the "mini-browser."
Register, Sign In, Sign Out
You are not required to Sign In to use Project Showroom. You can mix and match paints, flooring, etc, to your heart's content without doing so; however, if you wish to save a room so that you can later come back and see the choices you have made, you need to log in so we know for whom to save the room settings.
New Camera Navigation
Instead of the arrows in the scene view
we now have numbered views that you can select from. According to your feedback, this is more obvious in terms of number of views possible and which view is current.
We aim to please.
Appearance
We have generally spruced up the site.
- Our Product Designer, Mark Anderson, has given the site a splash of color.
- Based on your feedback, we moved some items to the bottom.
- The room name now appears below the scene view canvas.
- The callout in the scene view now points to the item it is describing.
- We augmented the green border around the thumbnail in the mini-browser with a green check mark to clearly flag items as present in the scene.
- The progress indicator is displayed while the server does its processing.
Mark cleaned this up to make it look more crisp.
So please take Project Showroom for a spin and let us know what you think via email, commenting on this blog posting, or in the discussion forum. We look at all three.
Evolving of software as a service technology preview for kitchen and bathroom design software is alive in the lab.