Autodesk Labs Shanghai Team Picks Strawberries

Autodesk Labs is a distributed team. We have team members in Nice/Sophia Antipolis, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Rafael, and Shanghai. Our mission is to discover, explore, and validate new approaches to design technology. Towards this end, we are involved in:

• Showcasing technology previews from all divisions of Autodesk on the Labs web site, collecting and responding to feedback, and analyzing metrics associated with those technology previews.
• Technical evangelism where we spread the word about new technologies and gauge the reactions from customers, partners, students, and employees.
• Development of reality capture technologies. Our team members have brought you technology previews for Shape Extraction for AutoCAD, Point Cloud Feature Extraction for AutoCAD Civil 3D, and Project Photofly.
• Development of rapid application delivery technologies. Working in conjunction with our partners, our team members have brought you technology previews like Project Twitch as well as other application streaming and application sandboxing technologies (used by Project Vasari and Inventor Fusion).

Last weekend a few our team members in Shanghai picked strawberries at a nearby farm.

“Let me take you down where I’m going to – Strawberry Fields.”
John Lennon, ”Strawberry Fields Forever,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles, 1967.

The strawberry belongs to the genus Fragraria in the rose family along with apples and plums - derived from the Old Latin word for fragrant. The strawberry is not classified by botanists as a true berry, because true berries, such as blueberries and cranberries have seeds inside. The strawberry has its dry, yellow seeds on the outside - approximately 200 tiny seeds on each strawberry. Native American Indians called strawberries heart-seed berries and pounded them into their traditional corn-meal bread. Discovering the great taste of this bread, colonists created their own version which became an American favorite now known as Strawberry Shortcake. ^source

Pictured: Guilin "Sydney" Xu, Yuanji “Reggie” Qin, and Jian “Eddie” Ding. Not Pictured: Xiaocong “Shayne” Peng who was preparing for his upcoming wedding.

Staying in touch with our organic side, as well as our programming side, is alive in the lab.