Gilbane VDC's Minority Report Glove has arrived (And it plays nicely with the Rift!)

The Myo Dev Kit is Here


So this is the Thalmic Myo.  It arrived yesterday.

It uses the muscles in your arm and key binds it via Blue Tooth to most open source devices.

As part of the Dev Kit, Thalmic has given us integration with:

VLC
iTunes
PowerPoint

and, most importantly, Unity!

For those of you who don't know, here at Gilbane VDC, we're using Unity and the Rift for AEC visualization.  

What the Myo means for us, is the ability to continue to push the virtual interaction with our buildings in a way that no one has ever been able to do in the past.  In addition to using the Rift for the visuals, we will soon be able to pick up and interface with objects in the scene we're showing architects and owners.



So enjoy our demo of holding a cup of coffee while wearing the armband!   

Why we use Grasshopper and Rhino


I was recently asked:

"Why do you guys rely on Rhino and Grasshopper so much?  Aren't Revit and Navisworks enough?" 

It's a good question, after all, Revit and Navisworks are stupid-expensive platforms.  Shouldn't they be able to do everything that we need?

Well, the answer to that is complicated, because Grasshopper is seen primarily as design tool in the same vein as SketchUp: It doesn't carry industry standard sizes or ISO standard geometry in the way that we can lean on Revit for.

But when it comes to point data, that is, center-points, centroids, and most importantly, multiple lines through 2 points in non-linear planes, Grasshopper and Rhino are your best friends.

A great example of this is getting ceiling crid lines from 2D Drafting Views in Revit to show up as useful linework within Navisworks.



There is a workflow within AutoCAD that would require lots of movement with Ortho turned on, but let's face it, no one likes working in 3D CAD.  It requires you to draw in Orthographic viewpoint, and you start to feel like M.C. Esher after about 15 minutes.  

 

 

 

Don't you love getting shop drawings in flat-ortho?

Our fix is to write a custom projection script within Grasshopper that lets us assign 2D grid lines to the entire piece of 3D geometry for the ceiling, not just the bottom.  In CAD, this requires a ton of duplicitive clicking.  Oh yeah, and we can do an entire building with one run of the script.


We'd rather finish in 15 minutes than 2 hours.

Contributions from Ben Peek, John Myers