The 12-year private-public partnership between the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) and Autodesk Research has generated important research, produced successful projects and continues to grow and evolve.
This long-standing partnership began with a company called Alias, that later became part of Autodesk, a leader in 2D and 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Currently working for Autodesk Research, Ramtin Attar, senior principal research scientist under the office of CTO, is a graduate of CIMS.
“I am one of the founding members of CIMS,” said Attar. “Over the years, we have had research collaborations with a number of professors at Carleton. One of the things that distinguishes our company is that we have a research department that operates similarly to academia. We speak the same language; we share similar goals of advancing the knowledge through publications and sharing research results. That makes it easier for us to align with existing academic mechanisms and collaborate on a number of fronts.”
Autodesk and CIMS share an interest in sustainability, and the studio has been using Autodesk software and support for environmental analysis, sustainability and design work.
One project that has been driven by this partnership is Digital Campus Innovation (DCI), an interdisciplinary effort to develop and evaluate new processes and technologies that will create improved approaches to decision-making during all phases of creating and operating sustainable communities.
As part of DCI, Carleton’s campus has been transformed into a living laboratory. This will enable Carleton to produce a comprehensive living dataset of diverse forms of information that will be used for teaching, research and everyday operation of the campus.
“Autodesk and Attar have been great, not only in providing us with software, but in providing technical support,” said Stephen Fai, director of CIMS. “Most recently, they have helped us financially with our DCI project. Their support was necessary to get the pilot going. During previous work with Autodesk, we had shown an aptitude for building information modelling and with their help we have exceeded our original goal of modelling three buildings on campus and have already completed four.”
Autodesk has an interest in scaling up research related to DCI and the project seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so in partnership with Carleton. Historically, Carleton has used Autodesk software and technology to help with CIMS research involving heritage documentation and data creation of built environments.
Autodesk has worked alongside Carleton professors from the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism and others.
“This is the kind of cross-pollination of disciplines that we like to see happening in the research,” said Attar. “We don’t often see it in academia unfortunately, as people tend to work in their own research silos. If we ever want to look at these things on a community level and on a large-scale campus level that impacts the world beyond campus, then this is very important.”
“We believe in the kind of mutual positive influence our two entities can have on each other. There is a lot yet to explore.”
About CIMS
CIMS is a Carleton research centre dedicated to the advanced study of innovative, hybrid forms of representation that can both reveal the invisible measures of architecture and animate the visible world of construction. As part of the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, it is committed to exploring and developing innovative symbiotic relationships between the digital and fabricated 2D and 3D modes of representation. Its mandate includes the advancement and development of the tools, processes and techniques involved in the transformation of data into tangible and meaningful artifacts that impact the way people see, think and work in the world.
About Autodesk
Autodesk is working to help solve some of the world’s most complex design problems, from pressing ecological challenges to the development of scalable smart infrastructure. Designers use Autodesk tools to not only create plans for buildings, for example, but also to simulate their impact on the environment and track their performance over time. Autodesk Research is unique in that we are dedicated to innovation and discovery in this realm. Our interests range from methods to help users learn powerful digital prototyping tools, to visualization and simulation techniques which enable designers to achieve new levels of performance. Advancing the state of the art in human-computer interaction, computer graphics and digital design technology, we collaborate openly with researchers at leading universities around the world.
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