Autodesk Demos Project Reframe at Colombia 4.0, Showcasing Animation Innovation

In early November, Autodesk was invited to present and demo Project Reframe at the Colombia 4.0 event organized by MinTIC (the Colombian Ministry of Information and Communication Technology). The Bogotá ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter suggested we attend the conference, and I was proud to represent Autodesk Research in my home city.

As usual with live demos, “anything can happen.” The laptop display locked itself twice, interrupting the demo, but luckily it did not cause anything more than a nuisance. The video below shows clips from the live demo.

In the first section, I highlight the various avatars and environments that the user can interact with, then I record an animation and play it back.  The following section shows the TimeTunnel interface, where I trim the ends of the video and edit the animation to add motion in the hips.

Later that day there was a Meet & Greet where the speakers interacted directly with the audience. There was a lot of interest in trying out Project Reframe and using it as a teaching tool, which speaks to the allure of its simplified animation interface.

Project Reframe makes animation approachable for novices, and I believe it could be used as a tool to introduce animation principles to new animators before they proceed to dive into more technical tools.

Reframe is also pushing the VR headset to its fullest potential. As the power and tracking ability of these VR headsets improve, users will be able to express themselves in their creations through Project Reframe in ways they couldn’t before.

From this event, it’s clear that Colombia is investing heavily into technology, progressing toward becoming a leader in the region. There is a lot of interest in AI and machine learning applications, as well as smart infrastructure. As Autodesk is an active contributor in these areas, I believe members of technology industries in Latin America would find our technologies useful.

As an example, let us consider the smart tourism track at Colombia 4.0, named “TravelTech.” Attendees in this track could integrate Tandem into their designs and workflows to leverage insights from tourist use of buildings and infrastructure. Alternately, they could jump onto a WorkshopXR session to review a tourist’s experience in a particular venue. Finally, they would benefit from Autodesk Research’s thought leadership in understanding the design of public spaces from an individual’s perspective.

I look forward to building research connections and collaborations in the region and I would like to express my thanks to MinTIC and Bogotá ACM SIGGRAPH for the wonderful opportunity to share Autodesk Research’s work at Colombia 4.0.