Marco Romero: November 2017

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Forge AR|VR Toolkit beta program

It's a real pleasure to announce the registration and approval for the
"Forge AR | VR Toolkit" beta developer program.

Forge is a set of Autodesk APIs and services for software developers to build innovative cloud-powered apps.

Augmented reality (AR) is an enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device such as a camera on a smartphone. On the other hand, Virtual Reality (VR) is an artificial world consisting of images and sounds created by a computer that is affected by the actions of a person experiencing it. Most first-person video games are examples of virtual reality and typically require special hardware like a headset or holder for a smartphone. So unlike augmented reality, in virtual reality, everything is virtual instead of real.

Autodesk Forge is a collection of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that we use to develop our own web services. As part of our Forge efforts, we share those APIs (including documentation and code samples) with customers and 3rd-party developers (the Forge community) that want to leverage years' worth of legacy and current data associated with projects.

Autodesk Forge connects development, design and engineering through cloud-powered services that enable collaboration, visualization and workflows. These services are then made accessible through application programming interfaces (APIs), where they can be provisioned and taken advantage of directly from a developed cloud application.

The latest enhancements to the Forge platform include a viewer, authentication tools and a host of new APIs, including data management, reality capture and 3D Print. The new viewer is capable of displaying 2D and 3D models from over 50 different file formats, and the updates to the authentication in Forge bring a consistent authentication and authorization functionality across the environment.