Web Fest, Hackathons, AU and WebGL Workshops

It is high time for me to get back here to explore new web related areas after the excursions looking at the journey to the cloud for a desktop oriented development team and the recent Dubai hackathon.

I've been overly busy with the The Building Coder, the Revit API community and the new release of Revit since then.

Here are my topics for today, both backward-looking to an exciting event held last week and forward-looking regarding my own plans for future activities and where to take this blog from here:

3D Web Fest Projects

I mentioned the first 3D Web Festival that was held last week in San Francisco. It was a great success, and completely sold out.

For some examples of really stunning WebGL, browse through this overview of the 3D Web Fest projects.

You want more details?

Well, here you have more details:

Here are all the sites that were present, including some that were not demoed:

These were the best, and the winners:

AngelHack and I♥3D in Athens

My next trip will be to Athens in two weeks time to the second I love 3D – Athens meetup, on June 5th, at The Cube, Greece's biggest coworking space.

All topics related to handling designs and models on the web are of interest, both 2D and 3D, although the focus will obviously be on 3D... The web has been flat for far too long!

We will also look at the Autodesk View and Data API, our GitHub samples demonstrating how to use it, and especially the quickstart tutorial demonstrating how to set up a Node.js server and client-side JavaScript code to display and interact with a 3D model, all in preparation for the subsequent AngelHack hackathon in Athens on June 6-7.

I would love to see you there!

Autodesk University Proposals

The AU 2015 call for proposals ends in just a few days, on May 26. Don't miss your chance to join the AU community of experts. Contribute to industry excellence, creative design, and the future of making things around the world. Submit your class proposal at autode.sk/CFPAU2015.

Autodesk University 2015

By the way, in case you need any help with it, Kean Walmsley is offering free AU proposal advice   :-)

I submitted my proposal for the annual Revit API expert discussion panel, and am now pondering a second one on connecting the desktop with the cloud, something like this:

Connect desktop and cloud: universal component usage analysis, visualisation and reporting

We describe the nitty-gritty programming details to implement a cloud-based system to analyse, visualise and report on universal component usage. The components can be Revit families used in BIM or any other kind of assets in any other kind of system. The focus is on the cloud-based database used to manage the component occurrences, either in global or project based coordinate systems. Searches can be made based on both keywords and geographical location. Models are visualised using pure WebGL, Three.js and the Autodesk View and Data API, providing support for online viewing and model navigation.

I wish you the best of luck with your own proposal!

Interactive 3D Graphics – Free Four-week Training Course

Are you interested in 3D graphics on the web?

I will assume you are, seeing as you are here now and reading this.

Well, maybe the free four-week Udacity course on interactive 3D graphics is just the thing for you to not just get started, but also dive in pretty deep and far.

I am working through it myself right now, in preparation for the next event below   :-)

Free and Open Milano WebGL Workshop

I already mentioned the plans for a series of hands-on WebGL workshops in Milan, Italy.

These are now taking further shape and will be more than just a couple of meetups; it is literally a course, offered for free, inspired by the OpenTechSchool initiative.

Participants are hand picked, by invitation only, targeting specific groups of professionals, ideally about two dozen people active in user interaction design, product design, game development, video and VFX studios.

Each meeting will consist of a hands-on learning session followed by a free experimentation part, offering the participants a chance to develop something new. We might also look at promoting something like a hackathon, developing contents adopting some of the latest web service APIs.

The confirmed dates are the four following Saturdays: June 6, 13, 20 and 27.

Here is the workshop outline.

Instead of being intended as pure self-learning, we will provide coaches to guide participants through the course curriculum, ideally at a 1-to-5 ratio. Coaches are 3D artists and OpenGL developers, all volunteers, just as the organisers themselves.

I now committed to participating in the final session on June 27th to present on the topic of implementing a simple NodeWebGL app incorporating some REST APIs that I covered here in the past few posts, a bit on the Autodesk web services, and then guide the other participants through some real live coding exercises.

Again, I would love to see you there, if you can make it!