Last evening we held the 1st Autodesk Design Night Portland and one of many I hope to be held in Portland in the future on various technology themes. This Design Nights theme was “Virtual World: Seeing Beyond Reality” and the event was completely packed and sold out. It was held at the stylish downtown Portland office of local creative agency INDUSTRY. Autodesk does have a Portland area office currently in Lake Oswego with almost 200 employees, but stay tuned for more details on our future move to Portland in 2018. We love Portland and can’t wait to do more in our community and with local companies and peers.
Design Night started with good food, good custom drinks, music by a DJ, cardboard VR viewer kits and things to customize them, and 3 Virtual Reality experiences.
Main speakers:
Autodesk’s Greg Fallon, Vice President, DLS Simulation Product Line Group open the Design Night.
David Weinstein, Director Enterprise VR, NVIDIA gave a presentation on VR in construction.
VR Demo Experiences:
1. USS Arizona Experience hosted by me (Shaan Hurley)
2. Porsche Macan using Autodesk VRED hosted by Brandon Godfrey of Autodesk
3. NVIDIA’s “Drone Flyover” hosted by NVIDIA’s Sean Wagstaff
For over 4 hours we led experiences with attendees and at times the lines were long. I didn’t take a single break giving the USS Arizona VR experience explaining the WWII ship in its pre December 7th, 1941 glory to how it looks today, Pearl Harbor then and now, and how we as Autodesk worked with the National Park Service, US Navy, HDR, and other partners using our technology to create an accurate 3D model of the USS Arizona underwater. USS Arizona in 3D Project Behind the Scenes The VR experience in Autodesk Stingray was created by Dave Tyner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DnWZMrnfg8
So many awesome people and excitement from the common “holy sh^t!” response when first experiencing VR to the jumping up and down excitement of a young 6 year old girls first VR experience. All ages and technical abilities loved it.
Thank you to all the partners like NVIDIA and my Autodesk colleagues that made the event happen such as Autodesk’s Lori Telles, Grace Hom, Pam Kilpatrick, Noah Cole, Lizzie Bennett, Liz Freuler, Brandon Godfrey, Alain Bolduc, Stacy Doyle, Roddy Wykes, Shelby Anderson, Ananda Arasu, Leisa Liebenow, Amy Jo Schuster and so many others. Hope to see you at a future Design Night Portland or other event.
-Shaan
