ACADIA 2011

Michael Braund, Chris Walsh, and I just presented a paper at this year’s iteration of ACADIA, a conference focusing on digital tools and techniques in architecture. Our submission was a paper featuring a human- space interaction analysis tool called, for lack of a better or even relevant name, “Dragonfly”. I will be posting some videos and hopefully a live demo over the next few days. We received some great feedback (mainly urging us to differentiate ourselves from existing tools and to do more testing), and we will certainly take those suggestions to heart.

Some of the outstanding papers for me were Achim Menges and company’s work with wood, Maciej Kaczynski’s (et al) work with digital fabrication (i.e. Robots!) of thin masonry vaults, Skyler Tibbits’ work on large-scale self-assembly, and of course Mark Foster Gage’s keynote talk telling us all to shut up about computation. Actually, I think he was telling Patrick Schumacher to shut up about computation….but perhaps it goes for the rest of us as well.

Dragonfly: New AI Agent engine based only on Perception

Here’s a preview of the completely new AI agent engine in Dragonfly. We’re really excited about it. For a couple reasons….

The first is that this AI engine is based only on perception, i.e. what the agent “sees” in a given frame. No navigation meshes, no looking around corners – just raycasting. This means that you don’t need to preprocess your geometry at all: simply drop in the agents and let them go….

The second is that they go up (and down…)  ramps! This may seem fairly trivial, but we actually found it to be quite tricky without nav meshes or preprocessing. How do you know what a ramp is? When do you go up one? When on one, why do you keep going?

Enjoy!