AU2007

AU2007 is in full swing, its bigger and better than last year. With over 10000 attendees worldwide descending on Las Vegas this is the biggest AU ever! The opening technology session this morning was introduced by Lynn Allen with a keynote speech by Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, followed by CTO Jeff Kowalski. The renowned designer Yves Béhar presented his vision for value design and showed a number of signature award winning concept design http://www.fuseproject.com/ including the Jawbone headset, xo-1 $100 laptop and LED lamp for Herman Millar. The audience where sat in a circular formation with the central stage with screens position in the middle. The backdrop also consisted of projected screens surrounding the audience. The attendees where teased with possible future Autodesk technologies which where projected onto these screens with high tempo bass driven beats!! It was a visual and audible delight! The audience where also shown a new preview technology product called Newport, which is a rendering and animation tool for the novice user. It was introduced as a tool for the casual user and can be learnt in a lunchtime! It doesn't look like it will replace 3dsmax but it will fill the gap for users who want to do high quality visuals but do not have the time and patients to learn complex products like Viz and Max. This was excellent, but no time frame for this as a usable product was given.

What’s this all to do with Revit you may ask? Well the eagle eyed may have spotted some Revit futures, but it was caveated with the normal Autodesk statement that these are concepts only. :-) Hmmmm lets see what 2009 release has to bring. However, what was shown at the AEC technology breakfast was a new Extension4 Revit Structure which allowed you to do analysis directly within Revit Structure. Time frame was not given and this was the first time it has ever been demonstrated.