A few weeks ago, the Dept. of Computer Science held their annual showCaSe event. For this event, computer science students from various high schools in Ontario were invited to come down to UofT to show off their best work. The winners of this event would be invited to go on a tour of Autodesk’s Toronto office. Last Friday, I was lucky enough to tag along with the winners to go on this tour.
For those who are not familiar with the company, Autodesk makes software for architects and designers. By far, their most famous program is AutoCAD; a computer-aided design software that is the industry standard for architects, designers, mechanics, etc. all around the world. Autodesk also makes Maya, another popular program that’s used for 3D modeling and animation (it was used for large-scale movies like Pirate of the Caribbean and Cars).
The tour was nothing short of amazing. The tour was organized by Dr Tovi Grossman, a recent graduate of UofT and an expert in UI design. Because Dr. Grossman is a part of Autodesk’s research division, we got to see a lot of the cool stuff that they were working on in the office. Among other things, we saw a volumetric display in action and got to play around with a brand new Microsoft Surface! It seems like their full time job is to cool stuff using all the latest tech and gadgets that are out there!
It’s really hard for me to describe in words some of the stuff that I saw there, but fortunately for me, pictures are worth 1000 words: http://www.flickr.com/photos/computerscience_uoft/sets/72157617299099725/show/
I’d just like to say thanks again to the guys at Autodesk for having us, and to Diane for organizing all this. It was a blast!