Autodesk Enters The Hobby Market

Autodesk aims to enter the hobby market with its offering of Autodesk 123d. If you’ve ever been spoiled by a nice CAD suite like Solidworks, Pro-E, or Inventor it becomes readily apparent that the free offerings don’t come anywhere close. At first Autodesk 123d seems to be entirely a Google Sketchup clone, and in some ways it is. Though, after a bit more exploring, the software offers some pretty advanced features, such as assemblies and constraints . All worries about it being windows only and closed source aside, it’s pretty cool that a big name in the CAD industry is taking a look at the hobby market, and overall it is worth testing out to see if it fits into your toolbox.
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Glimpses Of A 3D Volumetric Display

Custom displays are a lot of fun to look at, but this one is something we’d expect to see at a trade show and not on someone’s kitchen table. [Taha Bintahir] built a 3D volumetric display and is showing it off in the image above using a 3DS file of the Superman logo exported from Autodesk. In the video after the break you can see that the display is a transparent pyramid which allows a viewer to see the 3D object inside from any viewpoint around the display. Since first posting about it he has also added a Kinect to the mix, allowing a user to control the 3D object with body movements.

There’s basically no information about the display hardware on [Taha’s] post so we asked him about it. It works by first taking a 3D model and rendering it from four different camera angles. He’s using a custom designed prism for he display and the initial renderings are distorted to match that prism’s dimension. Those renderings are projected on the prism to give the illusion of a 3D object floating at its center.

We’re hoping to hear more details about how this was designed and what hardware is being used. We’ll post a follow-up if [Taha] shares more information.

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