The 41st AEC Hackathon event was held in Seattle this past weekend and was great and filled with many smart and inspiring people and several new friends and connections. First, the Seattle weather was amazing and I got in a morning run and flight in South Lake Union area.

The AEC Hackathon was held in the University of Washington campus Department of Construction Management CERC.

Friday the event began with introductions, speakers including Damon Hernandez the AEC Hackathon Executive Director, Salla Palos Microsoft Director of Transformation Services, and Mollie Fadule of Cephas. After the speakers and introductions people attending got up and introduced themselves to form teams. This was really good to see and participate in. many of the members of the teams had never met nd had different backgrounds from technologists, architects, to civil engineers, and AR/VR experts. The teams would then work until Sunday on a project to present at the end. I believe the video of the final presentations from the teams will be available soon.

Friday Evening

Saturday

Formed Teams working on their various projects from AEC topics like design reviews to an autonomous controller for a excavator.

Truss system designed in Fusion 360

In the afternoon Mark Schoennagel of Unity gave a great overview of Unity real-time visualization technology and the upcoming direct Autodesk Revit import to Unity including materials with Autodesk which will be announced very soon as a preview.

I loved the animated seagulls shown in his real-time demo of a Unity office in London. After he showed real-time rain on the windows it dawned on me he could change the rain to white and blame the big flock of animated birds. I like Marks humorous style and giving us a real deep dive into Unity including workflows, pain points, VR, and the upcoming raytracing.

Mark also showed the excellent work of Portland based Logan Smith of Bevel where Logan used Unity to build a AR BIM viewer.

There were some great panel discussions along with questions and answers held Saturday.

The Future of Real Estate, Panel Discussion

• Mollie Fadule, Cephas Partners and CREW Seattle

• Simon Stevenson, Professor or Real Estate at UW

• Sam DeBord, Real Estate Standards Organization and Seattle Homes

• Drew Meyers, Geek Estate

The Future of Construction, Panel Discussion

• Shaan Hurley, Autodesk Research

• Damon Hernandez, Samsung Research

• Stefan Schneider, CutMyTimber

• Greg Howes, AEC Hackathon

  Thank you to the AEC Hackathon organizers, participants, speakers, sponsors, University of Washington, and of course beautiful Seattle. See you all again soon.

  Photo I took Saturday morning.
  

  I hope to participate in many more AEC and other technology hackathons as I loved it!

  Cheers,
  Shaan