Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a number of guest posts by Autodesk colleagues working on a project that I think will be of interest to many of this blog’s readers. The first post is by Alec Shuldiner, who is introducing the project.
At Autodesk, we have a bridge. Recently, we gave that bridge a nervous system: sensors, wires to carry the signal, a small amount of local computing power to pre-sort the data, and, far away, in a virtual head, a brain to make sense of it all. It’s a neat thing, and in a subsequent post one of my colleagues will explain how we’ve done it. First, though, a few words about why.
Why make a dumb thing smart? One excellent reason is to make it better at being what it is. How does a smart bridge serve its function better than a dumb one? Bridges exist to get people or their stuff across a gap, and most bridges in the world, I’d guess, do just that. But gaps are interesting places, and some bridges serve a second function as a place from…