Glassbox is debuting their new cross-platform virtual camera and real-time collaboration tools. Glassbox began as Opaque media, was founded by Norman Wang in 2012 to develop content for VR. Opaque Media created Earthlight: Spacewalk, a VR experience developed with the help of NASA to communicate the experience of space via VR. In the process of developing content, the team developed … Read more
If you wanted to play Halo, or maybe Gears of War 5, which are non-PC games, you’d need a Microsoft Xbox game console and a TV or a PC monitor. You’d also need some patience and maybe a magic decoder ring because Microsoft has made buying an Xbox about as confusing as they can. How, why? By offering so … Read more
As a CAD program based on the ODA DWG format and the Graebert Ares CAD engine, CorelCAD come late on to the scene. The Ares engine was introduced in 2005 and today Graebert is a leading provider of a CAD engine for development. The company got a major endorsement when Dassault chose Ares as the base for its Draftsight CAD … Read more
Bentley teams with Microsoft’s upcoming HoloLens 2 to introduce Synchro XR; brings Mixed reality for AEC and specifically construction analysis and visualization. Bentley Systems and Microsoft have been collaborating since at least 2016 when the company announced its commitment to Microsoft Azure for its AssetWise CONNECT Edition and ProjectWise CONNECT Edition tools. Since then, Bentley has expanded the list of … Read more
When I first encountered Varjo’s human eye resolution VR HMD in 2017, it was impressive but rough around the edges. The company, based in Helsinki, has since grown from 12 to 112 people and has raised $51 million. Their headset is targeted to design and simulation customers. Varjo has taken the blank outside face plate and put a reflective surface on … Read more
Epic was the first company to demonstrate ray tracing using Microsoft’s new DRX API and Nvidia’s RTX technology at SIGGRAPH. They did that at GDC 2018 with a home-made movie using some of George Lucas’ stormtroopers who had the day off and nothing else to do. Actually, the experiment was created in collaboration with ILMxLAB. Careful you don’t slip on … Read more
I first learned about ray tracing from Turner Whitted in 1980 and have been fascinated by and about it ever since. About eight years later I was working with a company called Meiko which was developing systems based on the Inmos Transputer. The transputer was an innovative and advanced 32-bit floating-point processor with four high-speed serial nodes, and it could … Read more
I remember back when PCIe 2.0 was released and Jim Pappas, the daddy of USB from Intel, was the champion of it. PCIe 2.0 doubled the bandwidth of 1.0, and offered better flexibility while maintaining compatibility with PCIe 1.1. It seemed like magic then providing a 5 GT/s transfer rate with a throughput up to 8 GB/s with 16-lanes—PFM. At … Read more
Several companies offer a ray tracing plug-in for SketchUp, but Trimble calls this one the “premier renderer for SketchUp.” After more than four years of R&D, V-Ray Next accelerates the SketchUp workflow, and according to Chaos Group, the SketchUp plug-in offers massive speed and intelligence enabling designers to produce better renders faster. Chaos says V-Ray Scene Intelligence can now automatically … Read more
What’s best understood about ray tracing is that the technology produces physically accurate images, photorealistic depending upon the desires of the artist and producer. For example, BMW wants a perfectly accurate image that is photorealistic. However, Pixar wants a physically accurate image (for reflections, shadows, etc.) and they do not want it to be photorealistic, but stylistic. The Dark Knight … Read more
The Open Design Alliance has gone through a major transition as it expands to accommodate the varied requirements and interests of its broadening user base. Originally founded, with what now seems a fairly simple goal of making Autodesk's proprietary DWG/DXF format available as data exchange to companies and customers outside of Autodesk, the ODA developed its own CAD engine allowing … Read more
Is it good news or bad news that Autodesk has made SketchBook free and easy for all users? SketchBook started a revolution for Autodesk. It came out of the company’s industrial design portfolio that came with its acquisition of Alias back in ancient times … before tablets and before touch screens. Designers used it as a very high-end napkin. They … Read more
