Closing Session: Let's Get This Party Started

PRESENTER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Autodesk Senior Vice President, Information Modeling and Platforms Group, Amar Hanspal.

[MUSIC - LED ZEPPELIN, "ROCK AND ROLL"]

AMAR HANSPAL: Yeah. Well, thank you, Led Zeppelin. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to the closing session of Autodesk University. And what an AU it has been. We've had over 9,400 attendees. That's a record.

[APPLAUSE]

AMAR HANSPAL: There are people from 74 countries here and they've attended over 700 classes and labs. And get this, we estimate that over 27,000 cups of coffee have been drunk. You know, I think most of those I drank myself.

Now, as much as we thought about these incredible stats, in all these classes we thought, look, there's something that's really missing from this experience. And that we really need and what we really need is one really deep technical nerdy presentation about this really important topic. So today, right now, I'm going to walk you through this really great presentation. There's 130 slides. It's about CAD-directed CMM dimensional spatial planning. You guys ready?

[CHEERING]

AMAR HANSPAL: So let's begin with the uncertainty analysis and variation equation. Never mind. You know I'm kidding. You know, I'm too tired to even spell spatial planning. And I know you're too exhausted to sit through it all. So let's make a deal. I'm going to try and make the next 60 minutes fun, easy, and entertaining. Penn and Teller are going to be here in a bit. And so all you need to do is relax, sit back, and enjoy the show.

But first let me begin by just saying thank you. Thank you for making this event what it is. I'm struck, as I am every year, by the incredible amount of energy and insight that you bring to these four days. You guys are truly some of the most kick ass creative people I've had to know in my life. And it's been inspiring to talk with you all.

Thanks for sharing all that experience. Thank you for asking those great questions. Thank you for being in your seats at 8 o'clock in the morning, even though you went to bed at 2:00, 3:00, or never went to bed at all. So I actually I'd like to ask my colleagues from Autodesk to give our customers a round of applause and say thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

AMAR HANSPAL: Thanks, everyone. So, this week you've heard a lot about how the world of design is evolving and how technology is enabling this change. I'm going to kind of recap this week a bit for you. We began this week with Jeff challenging you to unlearn, relearn, and just learn to look outside your traditional way of doing things. And I really hope you'll take his advise and step out of your current mindset and your current tool set.

Now, Carl touched upon several new tools that allow you to do exactly this. Fusion 360, CAM 360, BIM 360, Infraworks, Reality Computing. Some of you got to see Showcase 360 that harnesses the power of elastic computing in the cloud and provides you this incredible, rich, interactive, visually stunning experience for creating incredible presentations and walkthroughs. And I'm sure, regardless of which industry you are in, you heard about a new way for your project team to work with Autodesk 360, which puts the project smack in the center and also provides a platform for those cloud based technologies I just referenced.

I'm sure you guys had one moment when you felt the ground move. Your world shift, and you thought to yourself, wow, this is really going to change the way I work. But I'm here to remind you about more than technology and tools. I'm really here to remind you that right here, right now, is the best time ever to be a designer, an engineer, an architect, someone who makes or builds great things. Now, why do I say that?

Now, to begin with, you all have some of the most meaty, thorny, most important challenges the world has ever seen. Housing, feeding, clothing, educating, transporting. 6 billion going to 9 billion people in the world, meeting all of the needs that they have in terms of products. You all live for that kind of big challenge. And throughout history, your peers have risen to these kinds of challenges.

From the shipbuilders who united the world through travel and trade to the folks that enabled the Industrial Revolution that we still enjoy today, to the folks that developed electricity, medicine, clean water, to people who enabled the Information Revolution through the computer and the internet. You engineers, designers, architects have been at the forefront of tackling and solving issues that have tested mankind throughout all these centuries. You, you, yes you, you are cut from the very same cloth as those people.

You have the imagination, the creativity, the ability, and the tools to fully bring to bear on today's challenges. You have access to tools and technology as never before, from the worldwide web that let's you access people and information from around the world, 3D scanning, 3D printing, new materials, on demand fabrication, all of this is now at your disposal, as is the supercomputer. Elastic computing brings you the same ability that only large companies once had.

You can use all of these to make much better decisions, much better products. So today you have these amazing challenges and the ability to solve them in ways that were not possible before. This is why I say it really is the best time ever to be an engineer or designer.

I know some of you are sitting there going, "Yeah, yeah, it's fine for you to say that. You don't deal with my boss. You don't deal with my budget. I'm not here to save the planet. I'm just building a better mousetrap." Let me say a couple of things in response to that. First of all, who said that being a great designer or engineer isn't about dealing with constraints?

In fact, dealing with constraints is at the very core of what being a great designer or engineer is all about. And who says that change has to happen all at once in a dramatic way? After all, didn't the world wide web start off just as a simple way for physicists to share documents and cross reference each other's work?

Now, I'm not alone in thinking that tools and technology are changing the world. So I'm going to share three examples with you from three completely different worlds. And these projects, these examples, tackle everything from enhancing education to re-engineering a city to designing a vehicle that has the potential to unlock the moon's resources.

And as different as these stories are, they're united by one idea. Each of these teams really believed. And as they thought about their problem and about the technology that was available to them, armed with a new mindset and new toolset, they believed this was their moment.

And I'm going to start those stories by talking about one thing that anyone would think is impossible. All of us have this challenge where, how do we get our 14-year-old kids off their damn phones and pay attention to math or science or history? Now, let's say you're trying to do that. You're trying to get them excited about engineering, this world of flight that's so amazing.

What are you going to? Are you going to sit down with a piece of paper, sketch out an airfoil, write down the fluid dynamics equation? Or are you going to bring them up close to the real thing, the Wright brothers airplane that started it all? And not just spin around a 3D object on screen, but interact with it, cut a cross section through it, get really up close to the engine that started it all.

What about getting them fired up about art or culture and getting them out of that YouTube dream that they constantly are in? Wouldn't you like to jolt them by getting them up close to this 1,000 year old sculpture called Cosmic Buddha and get them up close from hundreds of miles away to every last bit of detail, inscription, and story that's inscribed on this amazing piece of art? In fact, they can see detail on this that is not visible if you're physically present. You can see this stuff with the naked eye.

What you have out there is the digital version of some of the most iconic objects of the Smithsonian collection, powered by reality computing solutions from Autodesk. And as you can see, everything from supernovas to super crabs are as beautiful and as detailed as the actual physical objects. And they're part of an online 3D experience.

The Smithsonian decided to do this because they thought about this thing, that they have 325,000 square feet of exhibit space, but only 1% of the 140 million objects could be displayed in all that space. And even though they're one of the most visited galleries in the world, only about 7 million people get to interact with the gallery every year. So they decided to tackle that problem.

And today they're on their way to a museum that is accessible to anyone from anywhere 24 by 7, capable of holding more objects than their physical space and showing it in greater detail. It's not just the same, it's way better. This is what is made possible today. They changed their mindset, they changed their toolset, and that's letting them do more.

Educators can use these 3D images of past cultural and scientific achievements and teach the new interactive way. And students can get behind the glass and work with these artifacts and have their own personal experience. They can even 3D print these things. I'm going to show you one of those examples right here. This is one of those models that was printed directly from the website of Smithsonian.

And hopefully something like this will spark the imagination of children today and inspire them to join you and explore the world of science, technology, and engineering. So museums, inspiring students, thinking in a whole different way, seizing their moment. Big challenge taken head on.

You all love big challenges. You like tackling tough, gnarly problems. A gnarly problem like designing infrastructure for a growing, bustling metropolis. Let's take Los Angeles. Now, when you're planning infrastructure for such a large city, the whole scope to make any kind of plan requires you to work with terrain maps, aerial photographs, GIS data, building models, roads, bridges. By the time you see all of that, you end up with a headache and you kind of give up.

But remember, technology is changed. And it enables you to do things today that you were never able to do before. A tool like Infraworks brings all that information together, GIS, BIM, a gigabyte, a terabyte, it's all the same to it.

Here is the port of Long Beach. It's one of the busiest sea ports in the world. It's the second busiest in the United States. 3,200 acres, 10 piers, 80 boats, 66 cranes, 22 shipping terminals. I'm tired just saying that. Now imagine having it all present in a single one 3D model.

And as impressive as it is to get all of the port of Long Beach in a single model, as we zoom and pan you can see that there's way more than the port present in this one 3D model. There's the entire metropolis of Los Angeles. And you can start to see this as we move and you see hundreds and thousands of road, rail segments, terabytes of terrain, imagery, 3 million, 3 million buildings in a single model.

Now, in LA there's a number of projects being planned really to connect all these communities. And the 6th Street bridge is one of them. And like any project, there's more than one idea, more than one proposal. And in order to understand what the best design is, the city needs to iterate and understand what the best proposal might be. And so here you have it in that single context.

And in fact, even underground rail stations are part of that single model, all their surface surroundings, their connections, access areas. One model for all the planning projects of the city. Thousands of miles of roadways, multiple projects, the world's busiest seaport, underground transportation, all for the second largest city in the United States. Big problem. The city of Los Angeles. Thinking different. Seizing their moment.

Now, we've talked about digital museums, we've talked about modeling at this urban scale. Let's go to the moon. Now, what is more recognizable than the moon? What holds more superstition, inspiration, and all? Pink Floyd, John Lennon, they wrote songs about the moon. Shakespeare, Tolkien wrote about the power of the moon. And who amongst us hasn't dreamt of going to the moon someday?

Many of us remember Apollo 11 July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took those first steps on the moon. And I bet many of you, certainly I have dreamt about being an astronaut, or being in part of the mission control crew, or designing the next great spacecraft for the moon. President Kennedy once said about space exploration that we chose to go to the moon not because it was easy, but because it was hard. And we have a great generation that rose to that challenge and delivered.

Well, what about our generation? can we rise to that challenge? Could you or I design a spacecraft? After all, technology has changed to amazing amounts. There's composite materials with new strength and weight characteristics, there's additive subtractive manufacturing, there's new design and simulation tools that leverage infinite computing. That must be redefining what's possible today.

Can a single engineer do what once took an entire team to do? In the age of Apollo, you'd have these amazing spacecraft, computer boards, and people would say, "It was designed by Company XYZ." Well, today you would say that board was done by Dorian.

So let me introduce you to this company, Moon Express, who's seizing their moment. They're dreaming big. They're taking advantage of all that technology I just talked about and developing a flexible and scalable robotic spacecraft that radically changes the economics of space exploration and unlocks the mystery of the moon. It's a really cool story.

I was able to go down to their campus and meet with them. Guess what? There isn't a single person there who wears a white dress shirt or a skinny black tie. Meet the new rocket scientist. In fact, they're here with us today. Say hello to the Moon Express team.

[APPLAUSE]

AMAR HANSPAL: Welcome, guys. Now, one of the fun things about their environment is that this incredible workspace, that's of course protected by wookiees, And they have posters that say, "What Would Spock Do?" I've been asking that question to myself all the time.

But more seriously, Moon Express is practicing a very different process to bring their spacecraft alive. Instead of physical prototypes, a lot of those, and testing those, I watched Mike stimulate the flow and sloshing of how fuel would move within the vessel using SIM 360 from Autodesk. It was a marvelous experience to watch this happen. It gave me goosebumps and I felt like that kid in 1969.