Autodesk University 2009: General Session Keynote

Held last week in Las Vegas, Autodesk University (AU) this year was a smaller affair compared to previous years, with 5,700 attendees compared to 9,000 in 2008 and 9,500 in 2007. Not surprisingly, many firms have reduced their travel budgets in response to the economy, and Autodesk responded to the significantly reduced registration numbers by allowing those who could not travel to Las Vegas to attend the conference “virtually.” This enabled an additional 16,000 or so attendees to watch many of the main sessions and classes online in real-time, depending upon whether they signed up for a free pass or a $99 premier pass. Even when the economy rebounds, it might make sense for Autodesk to continue the virtual option, so that the event can reach out to a broader audience and attendees have the option of avoiding the travel and reducing their carbon footprint—important for a company that is solidly on the “sustainable design” bandwagon. The reduced attendance numbers certainly made for a more manageable conference. Similar to last year, this year’s AU was preceded by AU China in Beijing with 950 attendees and AU Japan in Tokyo with over 500 attendees, so that meant fewer visitors from those regions to the main event. In response to a question, Autodesk did rule out having a separate event in Europe, at least for now, so interested attendees from those countries would still have to travel to the US or opt to watch AU virtually.

As always, there was the opening general session, various industry-specific keynotes, over 500 classes covering the broad spectrum of Autodesk applications, close to 120 third-party exhibitors showcasing software and hardware solutions that work with Autodesk products, and various additional social and professional networking events. The main event was also preceded by a day-long Design Computation Symposium focused on the use of optimization and generative tools to explore and inform design solutions, attendance to which was by invitation only. This issue of the AECbytes Newsletter captures the highlights and presents an analysis of the general session keynote that was held on the opening day of Autodesk University. It will be followed by an overview of the AEC industry keynote next week, while the Design Computation Symposium and an overview of AU 2009 exhibitors will be covered in separate articles next month.

The Technology Continuum

Unlike previous years where an external guest has been the main speaker at the keynote, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass opened the general session this year with an extended presentation in which he attempted to put newer technologies such as BIM in a historical perspective while simultaneously encouraging their adoption, while also providing some glimpses into the future direction of technology development at Autodesk. He depicted an interesting way of looking at any kind of technology as a continuum that spans five phases: Impossible; Impractical; Possible; Expected; and Required. For a user, the timing for technology adoption is important, because the competitive advantage is the greatest when they adopt it in the “Possible” phase. Taking the example of 2D CAD, it reached the “Possible” phase in the early 1980’s, and firms who implemented it at that time were greatly benefitted. 2D CAD has now reached the “Required” phase and everyone uses it, so there’s no competitive advantage to be gained any more. However, technologies such as BIM in AEC and digital prototyping in manufacturing are now in the sweet spot of the continuum where they have become “Possible” but not yet “Expected,” so firms adopting them now are deriving the maximum competitive advantage from them. While not explicitly stated, the message Autodesk is clearly conveying to its audience is to start adopting 3D technologies now if they haven’t done so already.

Bass went on to reinforce the message by providing examples of four companies in different fields who were implementing the newer (Autodesk) technologies in the “Possible” phase and achieving significant benefits. These include Green Ocean Energy Ltd, an Aberdeen, UK, based renewable energy company that is developing technological devices for harnessing energy from oceans, for which it is making extensive use of digital prototyping. The AEC industry example that was presented was Glumac, an MEP firm that specializes in sustainable design and is adopting BIM in conjunction with energy analysis tools to improve energy efficiency in its projects and enable clients get LEED certification, better and faster than its competitors. Some of its projects include the Providence Newberg Medical Center in Newberg, Oregon, the first LEED Gold certified hospital in the US, and the Wayne L. Morse U.S. Federal Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, which was also the first federal courthouse to receive LEED Gold certification (see Figure 1). The chip company, Intel, was the example highlighted from the plant industry; it is investing $7 billion for refurbishing 15 of its fabs around the world, using digital prototyping and 3D digital models for precise layouts, planning, and equipment installation.

It was, however, the example from the Media and Entertainment industry that really wowed the audience, even those of us who were from other fields. This was a company called Lightstorm Entertainment, an American independent film production company that was founded by James Cameron and is best known for films such as Terminator 2, Aliens, and Titanic. The company has just wrapped up work on Cameron's latest film, Avatar, scheduled for release next week on December 18. It is a 3D movie that includes a lot of computer imagery and special effects. Not only were we treated to extensive footage from the movie, we also had Jon Landau from Lightstorm Entertainment—winner of an Academy Award as producer for the Titanic—present at the opening session to tell us more about how Autodesk technologies such as MotionBuilder were indispensable for the making of Avatar. It allowed them to use a new motion picture production process called virtual cinematography to create a complete virtual world and bring it on stage to shoot the movie. Typically in movies with backgrounds created using special effects, the actors act out their scenes against a plain backdrop which is then substituted for the virtual scene. With the new technology, the actors can actually see themselves superimposed on the scene in real time as they act, making the process more realistic and allowing them to emote better. For actors whose looks will be digitally altered in the movie, as in the case of the main character in Avatar (see Figure 2), the technology also allows them to see what they will actually look like as they are acting. It comes as close as possible to being a live action movie, and the resulting footage of the special effects sequences did not feel computer-generated, even though it was. Landau disclosed that Steven Spielberg’s next film, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, planned for release in 2011 is also using the same technology.

Technologies Currently Becoming “Possible”

After the Avatar presentation, Carl Bass took over again and continued the discussion on the five-phase technology continuum, this time focusing on five capabilities that Autodesk sees as currently being in the “Impractical” and “Possible” phases. These are Design Exploration, Analysis, Story-telling, Access, and Collaboration. Bass also talked about how the emerging technology of web-based computing will impact all these capabilities. “Design Exploration” refers to the use of the computer to play “What if?” scenarios with different design options, such as in the Centre Pompidou-Metz project in France (see Figure 3) where the geometry was combined with knowledge of constructability, allowing design computation to only generate forms that could actually be built. (This project was also discussed in the Design Computation Symposium, which I will be writing about in a separate article.) The “Analysis” capability was demonstrated with an example from the manufacturing field, an electric shaver designed with Inventor, which also included an “analysis dashboard” that updated in real time as modifications were being made to the design, showing how the different criteria and their parameters were being satisfied. Web-based computing can facilitate analysis by running optimization algorithms to determine a set of possible solutions to a design problem, which can then be explored and developed further on a local computer.

“Story-telling” refers to the use of gaming software to develop highly realistic simulations of projects to communicate design intent to clients and other interested parties. This was demonstrated by a video developed by the engineering firm, Parsons Brinckerhoff, showing their proposed reconstruction of Doyle Drive running through San Francisco’s historic Presidio district, which sought to assure city officials and residents that the new design would improve the traffic flow in the area while still preserving its beauty and character (see Figure 4). “Access” refers to multi-platform and cloud computing, with Autodesk working on more Mac applications to add to the ones it has in its “Media and Entertainment” division, more smartphone applications such as its Sketchbook Mobile for the iPhone, and more web-based computing initiatives such as Project Twitch, which is exploring remote delivery of Autodesk applications over the Internet. For the last of the five capabilities, “Collaboration,” that Bass talked about, not much was disclosed apart from a brief display of a possible upcoming feature in Revit that would allow real-time clash detection.

Whole System Thinking

The guest at this year’s keynote was Amory Lovins, Cofounder, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), which was established with the mission to drive the efficient and restorative use of resources. Naturally, energy efficiency is a key focus area of the RMI, and Lovins, who also has the distinction of being a MacArthur Fellow, is widely considered among the world’s leading authorities on energy efficiency and integrative design. He shared some examples of projects he has worked on, including his own home in the Rocky Mountains (see Figure 5). It was designed and built in 1984 as a passive solar house partly built into a hill, with 16-inch-thick stone walls, solar panels, and a greenhouse in the central living room that lets in light and stores heat in a variety of plants growing indoors, including bananas, which he actually brought with him to show at the event! Although the upfront costs were high, the house has saved enough in cooling and heating bills that it paid for itself in couple of decades.

Another example of an RMI project was the design of a car called 1X, intended to show that a car built with lightweight material can save a lot of energy by consuming proportionately less fuel than a regular heavy car. The 1X is built with a material that is even stronger than titanium and is designed so that it can be assembled by simply snapping its different parts together. The auto industry has become interested in this idea, with Toyota launching its 1/X Concept Car, and Honda and Nissan also exploring similar initiatives. Another area with tremendous energy saving potential is pipe design. According to Lovins, 30% of the world’s electricity is consumed operating fans and pumps, and these can be made much more efficient by using shorter, straighter, and thicker pipes. He concluded by talking about the importance of optimizing the whole system rather than just individual parts for any kind of design, and briefly mentioned an initiative that RMI had launched called Factor Ten Engineering (10xE) that aims to provide engineers with tangible guidelines to whole-system thinking for enabling radical efficiency gains.

Autodesk’s Future Direction

The general session ended with a brief presentation by Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski who referred back to the technology continuum Carl Bass had introduced and posited that a combination of the Design Exploration, Analysis, Story-telling, Access, and Collaboration capabilities would be the next technological development to reach the “Possible” phase. Examples of such combined capabilities include a manufacturer developing a lighting fixture using modeling, analysis, and prototyping to ensure it meets performance requirements, and subsequently publishing it to Autodesk Seek, where it could be used by design professionals using applications like Revit, as well as end consumers using a web-based application such as Project Showroom to visualize how products, appliances, fixtures, and materials would look in their home designs (see Figure 6). One of the reasons for the tremendous success of a product such as the iPhone is that it brings together a number of capabilities that work together, unlike, for example, a Swiss army knife that simply combines a bunch of separate tools in one product. Apple is obviously a good company to learn from.

While Kowalski did not provide any more specific examples on how exactly Autodesk was working on combining multiple capabilities in its applications, he did hint at some possible technologies being explored, including the ability to work with laser-scanned point cloud data with feature recognition capability that would make it easier to derive a building model from the scanned model, and enabling augmented reality on mobile phones so that they could be used to see modeled data such as pipes and ducts overlaid on an actual scene seen though the phone. He also reiterated the optimization concept, which seems to have been one of the central themes of the overall session, by envisioning an “analyze first, then design” process for AEC firms, instead of the traditional design-analysis sequence, which includes so much of trial and error. For example, architects could set up the basic parameters of a design, and the system could explore every possible option that matches those criteria, providing a starting point for the design that has already taken multiple criteria into account and ensured that they have been satisfied. Other possibilities are using the computer to find optimal solutions for specific aspects of a design such as orientation, glazing, materials, etc., which it can derive by running through all possible combinations on dedicated servers in the “cloud.” It was not clear, however, if Autodesk was actually in the process of developing any such technologies in-house or if these were just future directions it was intending to explore.

Analysis and Conclusions                                                                    

I found the general session keynote this year high on ideas but short on specifics. The concept of the five phase technology continuum presented by Carl Bass was very interesting and made sense: it also made a good case for users to start implementing new technologies such as BIM, analysis tools, and digital prototyping sooner, while they are still relatively new, rather than later, when they have commonplace and everyone is using them. On the other hand, the discussion of the five capabilities that Autodesk sees as currently becoming “Possible”—Design Exploration, Analysis, Story-telling, Access, and Collaboration—was not as convincing as it was not backed by enough substance. Autodesk did not show specific examples of tools or features that really demonstrated these capabilities, apart from fleeting videos that could have been mock-ups rather than actually functioning applications.

There was much emphasis on optimization and the use of the computer to “analyze first, then design,” particularly in the context of sustainability and energy efficiency, but we have yet to see any tools from Autodesk that allow users to do this. Autodesk had talked about the exact same ideas—tools that pre-compute all the possible options for a specific task, find those that best match specified criteria, and present them to the designer for selection—in last year’s keynote address, but it has yet to come up with such tools. And it’s not as if there are no precedents for this kind of technology in our industry. Last year, I had written about SITEOPS, which successfully applies optimization technology to site design, using remote servers to calculate and provide an optimal solution for a building layout, roads, and parking on the site, as well as site grading and storm water drainage. Why, then, has Autodesk been so slow to innovate and come up with optimization tools, despite talking about them for some time now?

Another problematic aspect I have been finding about the keynotes at Autodesk University is that they do not always build upon what was discussed and presented in earlier years. In 2007, there was a flashy presentation on Digital cities along with the fascinating “Project Chicago” video, that showed a hypothetical scenario in which several members of a design team gather before a large touch-sensitive video screen and explore various energy-related scenarios for the project interactively by just using their fingers to navigate through the project, make selections, and so on. In 2008, Carl Bass talked about two new trends in design that Autodesk is attempting to cater to: bio-mimicry and algorithmic design. There was no mention of any of these concepts this year, no follow-up. It makes you wonder if the keynotes are simply put together afresh every year to capture some of the latest buzzwords, rather than being an accurate reflection of what the company is actually working on.

From my perspective looking at the AEC industry, I found relatively little in the keynote to get excited about. There was no indication that Autodesk was even looking at some of the critical problems AEC firms are facing such as unmanageable file sizes and model-based collaboration, let alone coming up with solutions for them. In contrast, the technology developments in the Media and Entertainment division seemed far more ground-breaking, and the presentation on Avatar was extremely fascinating. Given the current state of the economy, it is understandable if Autodesk was forced to cut back on some of its developmental resources across all industries, including AEC. However, I do hope some progress has been made and the field is not as stagnant as it came across in the general session. We will revisit this issue after looking at the AEC industry keynote next week.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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