If you had to boil down Autodesk‘s business to a few simple words, it might be “helping people create new realities”—whether that means constructing new objects or structures first envisioned on the company’s computer-aided design (CAD) programs or generating new Avatar-like movie worlds using its modeling and animation software. But increasingly, the first step in the process of modeling a new product or environment is capturing an existing reality, then building on it. And a new cloud service hatched by Autodesk Labs, the company’s San Rafael, CA-based experimental design group, helps professionals and amateurs alike do exactly that, by synthesizing eerily accurate 3D computer models of almost any object or space from a few dozen conventional photographs.

Released in early November as an official Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) beta product, the service is called 123D Catch, reflecting its place in a growing family of amateur-accessible design tools under the 123D brand. It uses a technique called photogrammetry to identify common features in a series of photos snapped from multiple angles. From those reference points, Autodesk’s servers can recreate the scene as a 3D mesh, like the model of my head shown below. The 3D models can then be modified using simple CAD programs like 123D, or even printed out and reassembled as real world sculptures using yet another Autodesk program, 123D Make.

It’s pretty amazing stuff for anyone who has a bit of maker in them. Until recently, building detailed photogrammetric models of everyday objects wasn’t possible without a battery of expensive laser scanners. But 123D Catch is just part of Autodesk’s larger plan to reach beyond its traditional audience of professional architects and designers with tools that can help advanced amateurs create, explore, and build their own 3D objects. And it’s a first step toward a future world where small-scale custom design and manufacturing may be widespread—and where Autodesk hopes to stake a big claim.

The “things industry” is gradually going the way of Netflix, argues Autodesk Labs vice president Brian Mathews. “We used to use money to buy things—shoes, glasses—but now we will effectively buy ideas,” Mathews says. “That is our prediction.”

And since the ideas will be digital, it will be easy to tweak them to our own tastes before they’re brought to life. Autodesk describes this as the “scan/modify/print” worldview. “In the music industry, people rip songs and deejays put them together in new ways,” Mathews observes. “That is also going to happen with the things industry. We’ve got the ability to modify things with 123D and do 3D printing with 123D Make. But what we haven’t shown is the scan part, and that’s what [123D Catch] is one aspect of—bringing laser scanning down to the consumer level.”

Autodesk first shared a preview version of 123D Catch under the code name Photofly in early 2010. I visited Mathews at Autodesk’s San Francisco offices this fall to learn more about Autodesk Labs, and we ended up focusing on Photofly as a soup-to-nuts illustration of the group’s mission and working pattern. “Everyone [at Autodesk] is inventing and improving, but an invention is not an innovation,” Mathews says. “An innovation has to be more in the practical realm; it has to work. We make real-world prototypes instead of research stuff, and our key differentiating feature is that we involve our customers. When we have something really new like Photofly, we are involving the customers in the R&D process from the beginning.”

Indeed, makers using early versions of Photofly have come up with some pretty stunning creations. One of the most impressive is this music video from the Brisbane, Australia-based electronic-pop band Hunz; it’s populated by haunting Photofly models of lead singer-composer-programmer Hans Van Vliet. But users have also employed Photofly to model more mundane scenes, from archaeological digs to ratty jogging shoes.

Photogrammetry—the process of measuring objects from their images—is a science that dates back nearly to the invention of photography in the mid-1800s. But it’s gotten a huge boost in the last decade from the introduction of digital photography and … Next Page »

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Burlington, MA-based Vela Systems, a mobile field software startup, said today it has raised a $6 million Series B equity financing led by new investor Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK). Existing investors Commonwealth Capital Ventures, GrandBanks Capital, and individual investors also participated in the round. Vela Systems says the new money will be used to “expand and address rapidly-growing customer demand,” as well as to support and expand the company’s existing partnership with Autodesk. Vela Systems was founded in 2005 and makes field management software that runs on iPads, tablet PCs, and other mobile devices for construction, architecture, and engineering applications.

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(Updated—6/15/10 at 8:35 am Eastern time) Bill Mitchell, an academic expert in urban design who helped oversee the $1 billion development project on MIT’s main campus in Kendall Square, died on June 11 after a long bout with cancer, according to MIT News. He was 65.

Mitchell, who joined the MIT faculty in 1992, was the former dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and a professor at the MIT Media Lab. According to MIT News, he pioneered approaches of weaving together principles of design and technology to enable cities to limit the use of resources and better serve the needs of citizens. For example, MIT reports that he proposed the development of the “CityCar,” a lightweight, folding electric vehicle that people would share and store in convenient locations throughout their cities.

Mitchell’s legacy is literally cemented in Kendall Square. He served as architectural advisor to former MIT president Charles Vest for the $1 billion project that brought the school some of its landmark buildings, including the Stata Center (designed by the famous architect Frank Gehry) and the Media Lab Complex (the brainchild of the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki).

“[Mitchell's] guidance was essential in the transformation of our physical campus,” Vest told MIT News. “He was a wonderful friend and colleague who brightened MIT and respected and advanced the human experience of our faculty, students, and staff.”

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child Foundation in Cambridge, MA, is the co-founder and former director of the MIT Media Lab who knew Mitchell for decades. Negroponte says he first met Mitchell at Yale University, where Mitchell was a student and Negroponte was a visiting faculty member.

“Bill’s understanding of architecture and of cities, provided a unique point of view on technology in general and computers in particular,” Negroponte said in an e-mail. “Frank Gehry would not have been Frank Gehry without him. Urban transport will under go the same kind of transformation because of Bill’s work.” (Editor’s note: The previous two paragraphs were added this morning to this story, which was initially published late yesterday afternoon.)

For more on Mitchell’s long list of contributions to MIT and the field of architecture, you can read his full obituary from MIT News. Here’s a link to some of Mitchell’s lecture on the MIT World website. Xconomy is seeking additional insights about Mitchell from his former MIT colleagues, and we hope to share those as we receive them. (Editor’s note: This paragraph was modified from its original version to include a link to Mitchell’s lectures.)

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Wouldn’t it be great to design and build your own personal house, real cheap? It may sound like a dream, but not for much longer. Difra, a Cambridge, MA, company co-founded by graduates of MIT, is working hard to fulfill this ambition.

Their idea is to use computer-aided design and manufacturing software (CAD-CAM) to model new houses in 3D, then translate the designs into kits containing all the flat 2D components needed to build them—in this case, engineered wood boards that interlock via so-called “friction joints.”

“To transform 3D to 2D for a typical, average-sized house of 1,600 square feet consisting of several thousands individual components is a very demanding task if done manually,” says Difra co-founder Morris Cox. But automation cuts the cost and the complication down to size.

Difra will sell its system directly to individual home buyers—and it already has some clients lined up. “Although our aim is to provide ordinary people with personalized homes, we will initially build more luxury homes, to show what can be done and gain acceptance among a broader audience,” says  Cox.

“My dream is to enable people, even on limited budgets, to personalize their homes, to allow freedom in design,” adds Cox’s co-founder Lynwood Walker. “Light and color, form and feeling, we let people have it the way they want it.”

The team dug into a CAD system called Rhino—chosen for its ability to model surfaces and export data as CAM files that can be used in fabrication machines—and wrote algorithms that translate designs into practical plans that can be built using friction joints, which fit together using only glue.

Once a Rhino model is transformed into drawings of the fundamental 2D components, the 2D files are fed to a laser cutting machine. Pieces are cut and numbered by the machine. All the pieces are neatly packed and sent to the construction site, together with assembly instructions.

“Building a home is like laying out a giant 3D-puzzle”, says Cox. “It is the perfect community project. Most of it can be done by ordinary people. We see it as a rewarding and socially enriching project for neighbors, relatives or other groups.”

Cox estimates that a small house or cottage can be put together in no more than … Next Page »

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When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to … Next Page »

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As a longtime advocate for sustainable building design, I have spent decades listening to people associate solar energy with ugly black boxes on the roof of the house that belonged to the neighborhood nutcase. I’m here to tell you those days are gone forever. I now find myself sharing the dais with the owners of those early solar systems. That nutcase is now a keynote speaker, and we’re finally beginning to appreciate the beauty of that vision.

Nowadays we’re bombarded with images that convey a different aesthetic of solar technology. Brilliant, elegant black solar panels gleaming in the sun against a perfect clear blue sky. Political candidates and even petroleum companies are parading their green initiatives with these beautiful images. Solar now means a sustainable future, clean energy, clean air, and a solution to global climate change. It might seem unusual, but in this case, the image matches the reality.

Historically, architects have translated new structural and functional technologies into elements of expression. We’ve done this with virtually every material we build with: stone, wood, concrete, steel, and composites. Our palate of materials has expanded throughout history for functional reasons, but as designers we use them to express shape, line, texture culture—and in the case of renewable technologies, powerful societal changes, values and aspirations. Now leaders in the architectural and construction communities are thirsting for new elements that express progressive aesthetics, elements that imbue meaning and value to the clean and sustainable energy movement.

We now have designers and architects using clean technology—solar energy, wind generator units, and other products and materials—as their preferred palate of expression. This is helping elevate early renewable energy enthusiasts to visionary status. And this contemporary connotation of clean and sustainable alternative energy is coming to your neighborhood and mine.

What needs to be understood, taught, and reinforced is that we … Next Page »

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Architect Bob Noble was the CEO of San Diego’s Tucker Sadler firm when Kyocera America asked if he would consider designing a “solar carport” for its San Diego headquarters, using photovoltaic solar panels made by Kyocera.

The request might have been a non-starter at any other venerable, 50-year-old firm. Solar carports, after all, have been done before. And Tucker Sadler is known for its work on major projects, such as the recent expansion of the San Diego Convention Center, the Christina Gateway master plan in Wilmington, DE, and the storefront, entry, and interiors for Barneys New York in New York City.

But Noble has long been a passionate advocate for sustainable design. When I first met him 15 years ago, he was the founding CEO of Gridcore International, a venture making fiberboard-like structural panels from shredded U.S. currency and recycled cardboard. So he jumped at Kyocera’s proposal.

“For me it was an exciting opportunity,” Noble says, rattling off his experience and credentials faster than I could write. I looked at him, exasperated, and he said, “Let’s just say I’m an eco-preneur.”

The result proved to be something of a revelation for Noble, who saw that parking lots represented an enormous opportunity for developing solar structures.

“Parking lots are big, hot, urban heat islands,” Noble says, working himself into another rapid-fire fusillade. “They’re bad for landscaping, bad for water drainage. They are the wasteland that you have to go through to get to a building.”

Instead, Noble argues that parking lots should be the giant canvas for integrating renewable energy technology with architecture and sustainable building design. He argues they are far better suited for solar arrays than the rooftops of commercial buildings, which are dominated by housings for mechanical equipment and worries about waterproof membranes. As a recently recruited San Diego Xconomist, Noble also will be making such argument on our forum.

Solar arrays like the “solar grove” that Noble created for Kyocera parking lot and at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., generate … Next Page »

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Along West 4th Street in Boston, just past I-93 and the MBTA train yard, there’s a big brown apartment building with an odd sloping roof. I live about a mile away, and I’ve gone past this building several times on walks and bike rides without thinking much about it, except that it’s unattractive in an early-1970s sort of way. It reminded me of the work of the late Josep Lluís Sert, the architect responsible for such aging modernist eyesores as Harvard’s Science Center and Holyoke Center, the Peabody Terrace apartments in Cambridge, and the George Sherman Union complex at Boston University.

I was surprised to learn this week that not only is the brown building brand new, but it’s being celebrated as an example of green design. It’s called the Macallen Building, and it’s the subject of an independent documentary, “The Greening of Southie,” that’s currently making the film-festival rounds; I caught the movie this Tuesday at a screening hosted by Atlas Venture, a Boston-area venture capital firm. (Update 11/20/08: Here’s a video about the screening prepared by the filmmakers themselves.)

A 140-unit luxury condominium complex, the Macallen Building has garnered warm reviews from architecture critics, including no less a figure than Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe writer Robert Campbell. It’s also the first residential building in Boston to win a Gold-level LEED rating, something that can only be achieved through serious effort on the part of architects and developers. (LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a voluntary certification system devised by U.S. Green Building Council to encourage sustainable building practices.)

So I’ll probably sound like an unenlightened, anti-environmentalist crank when I say this, but the Macallen Building strikes me as a sorry excuse for the “greening” of anything, let alone South Boston, the working-class neighborhood over which it looms. If this project comes to be seen as a model for green development in Boston and other cities, the green-building movement is in big trouble.

I do give the developers of the Macallen Building, Pappas Enterprises, credit for deciding to pursue LEED certification in the first place. As the film makes clear, the decision led to a thousand headaches that the company could have avoided by doing things the old-fashioned way. Construction crews had to set aside scrap metal for recycling, for example, rather than tossing all of the project’s construction waste into landfill-bound dumpsters. They cheerfully tried unproven but “sustainable” materials—such as the non-toxic glue holding down the condo units’ bamboo floors—that wound up causing costly complications. And you can’t argue with green design’s benefits: features like double-flush toilets, rainwater-trapping systems for landscape irrigation, and extensive natural lighting through double-paned, floor-to-ceiling windows mean that the building will save 600,000 gallons of water per year and use 30 percent less electricity than a non-green building.

I also have no objection to the way Pappas has made the building’s green design into a selling point with environmentally conscious condo buyers. Because the building is LEED-certified, the company is able to charge about 10 percent more than developers are getting for similarly sized condos in this corner of the city, according to the real estate review site ApartmentTherapy. That’s fine with me. After going to so much trouble, the company deserves to earn a bit of profit—and who’s going to finance the green-technology overhaul this country needs, if not capitalists? “Green is not about sacrifice…it is about understanding that doing good and doing well often go hand in hand,” the Macallen Building’s website intones. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

But there are several aspects of the Macallen project that bother me. One is the unfortunate symbolism in the fact that Boston’s first green residential building is a luxury condo. You have to be doing pretty well, indeed, to afford a one-bedroom, one-bath unit for $600,000 or a three-bedroom for $2.1 million. According to this 2005 Boston Globe article, the Pappas brothers—Tim, Andrew, and Jay—design their urban properties for city-loving young professionals like themselves. “We look at our peers and we look at our friends,” Andrew Pappas, then 26, told the paper. Another Globe article described Luke Peterson—a 25-year-old mortgage banker who put down $685,000 for a townhouse at First+First, another Pappas project in South Boston—as the ideal Pappas client.

I’m going to hazard a guess that 25-year-old mortgage-banking tycoons are in shorter supply these days. Indeed, there are still 20 empty units at the Macallen, even though the company briefly tried giving away a Toyota Camry Hybrid with each purchase. But at least the penthouse may soon be occupied; at last report, Tim Pappas, the 34-year-old real estate heir who heads Pappas Enterprises and drives racecars in his spare time, was close to persuading his girlfriend that … Next Page »

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In February 2006, Swedish physician, statistician, and global health expert Hans Rosling brought down the house at TED (the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference in Monterey, CA) with a presentation on health and economic trends in developing nations. But it wasn’t the content of the presentation so much as the software he was using that grabbed the audience: called Trendalyzer, the program converted Rosling’s data into colorful animated graphs. By representing countries as dots of varying size that moved against the x and y axes over time, Trendalyzer brought vivid life to changes such as the last century’s general improvements in income and life expectancy—and highlighted how health and wealth in once-lagging regions such as Asia have surged ahead, while they have improved much more slowly in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa.

To many in the audience (and to me, when I watched the online video of Rosling’s TED talk), the Trendalyzer presentation was a revelation, seemingly heralding a new era in which clever design choices coupled with serious graphics-processing power would cause all sorts of interesting trends in complex data to leap out at computer users. Indeed, the next year, Google announced that it had acquired the Trendalyzer software from Rosling’s non-profit Gapminder Foundation, saying that it hoped to improve and expand Trendalyzer and make it “freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes.” Unfortunately, like many other early-stage technologies that get anointed by the massive buzz amplifier that is TED, Trendalyzer has since receded from view. Google hasn’t done much with the software, beyond making a Trendalyzer-like gadget called “MotionChart” available as part of Google Spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, there’s a company in Newton, MA, that has spent the better part of this decade quietly applying many of the same design principles behind Trendalyzer to business problems—and selling its software, to boot. It’s called Visual I|O, and I spent some time recently learning about the company’s remarkably beautiful Web-based business analytics software, called DecisionIris, from company co-founder, president, and CEO Angela Shen-Hsieh.

Now, that’s probably the first time I’ve ever used “beautiful” and “business analytics software” in the same sentence. While Visual I|O markets DecisionIris as a business intelligence tool, and making sense of complex business data is certainly one of its strengths, it would be grossly unfair to lump the program in with the kinds of graphical tools offered by traditional business intelligence companies like SAP and Cognos, which are closer to the primitive chart wizards in Microsoft Excel than to anything a professional information designer might conceive. If you’re an aficionado of the work of Yale information designer Edward Tufte—author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations and the man the New York Times has described as “the da Vinci of data”—then you will immediately feel at home with the way DecisionIris represents logical relationships and changes over time, and with the innate sense of color and proportion built into the software.

I’m gushing, I know, but bear with me. The program’s beauty is undoubtedly traceable to the fact that Shen-Hsieh and her fellow co-founder Mark Schindler are both Harvard-trained architects, not software engineers. The pair created Visual I|O as a spinoff of Chicago-based consulting firm Schindler + Associates (where Mark was a partner) in 2002; they wanted to take the visualization software the firm had created to help clients such as pharmaceutical companies get a high-level view of their data and turn it into a commercial product.

Shen-Hsieh (pronounced “shen-shay”) and Schindler felt sure that there was a larger market for software that would help business managers visualize data more flexibly—switching between space-based and time-based representations, for example—depending on the kinds of insights being sought. After all, why go the trouble of collecting terabytes of data about a company’s performance and assembling it into huge, expensive databases and data warehouses if you can’t play with it at will? “If you look at the history of information technology, so much of it is focused on storing and accessing data,” Shen-Hsieh says. “We focus in the last 18 inches–from the screen to the brain. We’re about the cognitive piece.”

Since a picture equals one kiloword, I’ll refer you at this point to the picture at right. It’s a screen shot from a demo Shen-Hsieh walked me through, based on real data about residential properties for sale in the Boston suburbs of Brookline, Newton, Waltham, and Watertown. It illustrates how DecisionIris can help users draw meaning from a mess of data by bringing out multiple dimensions of the data simultaneously; an example about real estate seems easier for most people to relate to than heavy business analytics. (Click on the picture for a larger version.)

Each dot in the chart represents a house. The size of the dot represents the house’s asking price, and its color shows which town it’s in—Brookline is purple, Newton is blue, Waltham is green, and Watertown is yellow. The horizontal axis indicates the year the house was built, and the vertical axis indicates its square footage. (Notice how that’s already four dimensions of data, packed into a type of graph usually used for no more than two dimensions.)

What observations can be drawn from the chart? Well, right away, it’s obvious that houses for sale in Newton are older, bigger, and more expensive than houses in the other cities. That makes sense, given that Newton (where Visual I|O happens to be located) was one of Boston’s first major suburbs, and is still home to … Next Page »

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