Autodesk Acquires Immersive Collaboration Platform, The Wild

President of AECCafe Sanjay Gangal spoke recently with Montreal-based Nick Fonta, General Manager, XR division at Autodesk about Autodesk’s XR immersive experience and the company’s acquisition of The Wild, an immersive remote collaboration platform for architecture, design, and enterprise teams.

Sanjay: Thank you so much for joining us, Nick. So, tell us about Autodesk XR Solutions.

Nick: For sure. Autodesk has an interesting journey or history when it comes to XR. We started in the 1990s with our first project around XR, and it was a full 3D immersive experience with AutoCAD data that people could navigate into, a little bit like a first-person shooter. You could interact with basic interactions with the AutoCAD scene at the time. That was a project in prototype. And since then, we’ve been doing a lot of things, we have a research group who continued testing the limits of those technologies, but more recently, we’ve had a few things maybe worth noting. The first thing being about seven years ago, we moved into the real-time engine business, if you will, with our own engine, which was called Stingray. And we also built a first product in our trying to understand what that meant phase for Autodesk, and the product was called Revit Live. And both Stingray and Revit Live were our first real experiments to try to understand how real-time technologies, VR, and AR can can add value and solve real problems for our customers in the AEC and manufacturing spaces.

We tried a lot of things there, and then finally, a lot more recently, we have products today that support mostly VR, a little bit of AR as well in a portfolio. We have VRED, which targets mainly the automotive industry. VRED is a very high end, high resolution, high level of fidelity when it comes to imageries and rendering. It comes with the collaborative VR experience, so you can bring multiple designers to review, do the design reviews typically on cars, but it’s also used in other manufacturing industries. So that’s one, as a product, it’s been around for about five years, maybe a bit more, and is still around. It’s very successful, we’re seeing a lot of adoption and growth there, and we also have a capability called Create VR that allows designers to sketch and ideate in VR from scratch in a 3D space for a very creative way of transferring your ideas as a designer into the 3D world. Recently we released a capability out of Fusion products, one of our Hero products in manufacturing that allows any Fusion model to be experienced in AR, experienced on iOS with a publish to a USDZ. This is what we have today. This is where this all journey started, maybe a couple of months ago, and I’m sure we’re going to talk more about that now.

Sanjay: Autodesk recently acquired The Wild. So, tell us about this acquisition. And what does The Wild bring to the table?

Nick: We’ve been working on this for a few months now, recently announced two weeks ago. This acquisition of The Wild is a combination of talent acquisition and technology acquisition. In general, we want to accelerate our roads on our XR journey at Autodesk broadly. We have VRED targeting the high-end, super high-quality type of users and needs. What we’re trying to do is also start tackling lower barrier of entry type of experiences with mainstream devices. So, we’re thinking like mobile, cheap VR devices, soon the new AR headsets and glasses, when they’ll come out. The Wild is all about establishing a foundation for our XR journey, bringing the talent, bringing the tech that’s already connected to the solutions and cloud-connected solutions that we offer today in AEC with BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud, and we’re going to further connect those virtual work spaces for people to meet, discuss and make efficient decisions to our cloud-connected platform and move in the future from that as a foundation piece.

Sanjay: What are all the areas that The Wild will help in extending Autodesk Solutions?

Nick: First to be noted, with this acquisition, we’re getting two products or two technologies. Prospect, which is from IrisVR that The Wild acquired a little over a year ago, and The Wild, their own technology and own product. Both these products are known for solving real problems in the AEC industry today. We’re thrilled about the opportunity to further really integrate that into our platform. We really want our Autodesk platform, meaning Forge and BIM 360 and ACC, to be naturally extended with XR. This acquisition will really give us a head start in providing this collaborative virtual and immersive workspace for professionals to work, connect, make decisions and track those decisions on the platform. This is really the first step to further connect extended capabilities. We’re also getting a talented team with this acquisition, which will really help moving forward on our agenda.

Sanjay: And what is special about your XR Solutions? Why should somebody be using Autodesk XR Solutions versus any other thing available in the market?

Nick: I think it’s worth talking about maybe two important points here for that question. One is with our existing ecosystem of partners and solutions that are today, and in the future, hopefully even more connected to our platform. We absolutely see tremendous value in those partners to complement the value we have in the offering of this portfolio. It’s been true before with additional products, workflows, use cases and capabilities, and now that we’re going to have our Autodesk XR offering in workflow, it will remain the case. We still welcome and see value in those third parties attaching themselves and extending the ecosystem, so that will not change. While we will have our own XR Autodesk experience, we will continue to support partners connecting. So that will remain the same.

Now, the way we think ours will be providing slightly different value or complementary value, it relates to how it’s going to be connected to the platform. Our motto is ‘anything you can put on the Autodesk platform; you should be able to experience in XR’. We’re going to be tackling specific use cases that we think should be in our portfolio, but that will leave plenty of room, like I said, for other complementary use cases. These specific experiences and workflows that we’ll implement will be very, very tightly integrated with the Autodesk platform, the Autodesk eco-system and targeting specific problems for our customers while the third parties will provide complimentary solutions in the ecosystem.

Sanjay: What is the best way for our audience to find out more about Autodesk Excel solutions on the Internet?

Nick: We have a refresh or a new web page for XR on the Autodesk website, we can certainly share the URL with you, so that can be shared with the audience. And on that page, it talks a little bit about our journey, our mission, where we’re going, and we’re going t0 be adding stuff as news come out, as new information comes up, as new use cases and new workflows make their way into production for our users. It covers some of the things that we talked about regarding VRED, Create VR and the Fusion use cases, and soon enough, you’ll see more information being provided on that page.

Tags: Autodesk

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 7th, 2022 at 7:47 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.