Our small, yet dedicated Project Vasari team has been working hard on a new Labs release, which will be dropping VERY soon. Keep an eye out on Twitter, Facebook, and/or ProjectVasari.com. Our focus for this release has been on usabilty which includes new direct face manipulation tools and creating/editing in a perspective view. Yes. You heard that correctly.
see more details on our wiki site.
_tom
Yesterday was the day. We officially launched Project Vasari on Autodesk Labs. I thought I would give everyone a behind the scenes look at how this all came about.
As we said in the teaser, it started as a simple question: What if we reduced Revit to its essentials? Followed quickly by: What would it look like? What would we keep? Who would it be for? This evolved into the following goals:
The following design tenets were our guiding principles as we began conceiving of what to make
A persona is a one-page narrative that describes a fictional user based on user data we have gathered. After interviewing and surveying many students, we distilled that data into Gabriel .This helps us keep the team user-centered. As we face various decisions, we must ask "what would Gabriel think of this?" We also wrote a series of scenarios - stories with Gabriel as the main character. These act as the basis for some early sketching and storyboards (note, not all of these ideas made the final cut.)
In addition to the previously mentioned goals - we also wanted to see what a small team could do in a short amount of time. By "small", I mean one product manager, five software developers, two designers and one quality assurance analyst/blogger/mad scientist. By "short time" I mean six months from inception to delivery. To do this we adopted a more agile team process called Scrum. I won't go into much detail, but to put it simply Scrum is like IPD for software development: A cross disciplinary team co-locates to increase collaboration, breaks down roles to foster innovation (QA helps with design, designers do some coding, etc.) focuses work on a central information repository (in our case, the source code and a wiki) and shares equally in the risk and reward.
Yes and no. Yes, it is Revit at its core. But no, we did make some progress in some areas - primarily related to our design tenets. Ultimately, Vasari has become a platform to experiment and take some risks - something that has become difficult when trying to get the larger Revit out the door each year. So what's different?
I can't say. I know, I know - tight lipped as usual. Actually, it is because I really don't know. I do know that we have generated a lot of ideas (stories in our backlog, to use Scrum terminology.) Now that we have some time to breathe we will listen to the feedback that comes back from our target demographic, sift through the backlog and decide on what to tackle next. Until then, come join us on Facebook and Twitter where we will continue the conversation.
_tom
A video introducing Project Vasari's features:
Much has been written about how Autodesk ate it's own dogfood (man, I hate that saying, but it works) with the use of BIM and IPD for our new AEC HQ here in Waltham. But I thought it was worth pointing out the recent article in Metropolis, particularly the breakdown of upgrades that were made possible by savings realized by IPD (such as nicer finishes, custom lighting and exposed mechanicals - which are helpful when scratching our heads over certain MEP workflows!) Also, the BIM(x) blog just posted Tocci's take on the process, which includes a summary of LEED credits and the complete Platinum score card. See if you can spot a certain co-blogger in one of the photos...
And speaking of facilities, all of Autodesk is shutting down for the week of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States. So, blogging may dip in our post-feast stupors. See you in December! _tom
Photo: Jeff Goldberg/Esto
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