AIA: Pictures from the Show Floor and Around the Convention – Part 2

We continue our show floor photos here in Part 2.

In Part 1 we left off with HP and we’ll add another photo here of the new HP DesignJet T1500 ePrinter. This larger format unit, along with the T920, is part of a new family of products. The feature that stands out the most in our view is the way the new back tray holds and supports up to 150 prints.

We should also add that because of the new form-factor, there is a large area on top of the plotter for a plot print to lay out so a user can review it quickly. In other words, it acts like a table of sorts. We also like the glass cover over the print head zone so you can observe the printing action. This can be useful during troubleshooting.

01 – The new HP DesignJet T1500 has a rear printer tray drawing support mechanism that collates your drawings in any order you want as defined in the printer driver dialog box at print time. It can support up to 150 sheets. We played around with this mechanism and found it a bit enchanting. There is still an optional front-access basket at the bottom for additional output storage.

You can read our full report on the two new DesignJets here where we cover more details from the press-only invite launch event hold back in early June.

Not surprisingly, the SketchUp booth was the most active booth on the show floor. In our review, this has been the case every year we have been in attendance at AIA for the past few years. Of course the interesting part this year was the new booth period. Last year in Washington DC, the company was just acquired by Trimble but they attended the AIA National event in the former Google-branded booth.

02 – A neat innovation in the SketchUp booth this year was the physical representation of the new SketchUp logo.

The new booth was eye-catching and practical. I personally am a big fan of booths with mini-theaters in them. Though they can be snug for everyone involved, the advantages of a mini-theater is that it encourages “crowd generation” which is very important at a trade show event. In the image above the main theater screen is straight ahead while chairs filled the area between the large 3D logo and the screen beyond. Two flanking walls each side in the image above had demo-stations each side–and the company had plenty of stools for sitting down. The wall behind the main theater screen also had demo stations. If we had an award for best booth these guys would have got it!

As folks likely know by now, Trimble’s new SketchUp 2013 just was released in late May. The product was selected as BEST OF SHOW at this year’s AIA for its innovative extensions warehouse which is technically a store within a store concept in its early stages and includes aspects of Social.

03 – There were several SketchUp add-on software companies at AIA this year, including SUPodium. We don’t have pictures of everyone’s booth (sorry folks!) but we did snap this image.

The image above is from the SU Podium rendering plugin for SketchUp folks. Like many other companies, including Gehry Technologies and the Chaos Group, the SU Podium folks had a small booth at the show where they were demoing their photo-realisitc rendering plugin, plus their animation tool and Visio3D for iPad. Besides being one of the better rendering solutions for SketchUp, it is also one that works on both Mac and Windows version of SketchUp.

04 – Trust me when I tell you this was a rare moment–being able to see behind the many people watching things happen at the Gehry Technologies booth. I wanted to show some of the images they were showing on their wall.

Gehry Technologies was at AIA Denver this year and what we understand is that they did not exhibit at Washington DC last year but were in attendance. It was great to see this company on the show floor and their booth was quite busy. Principally they were showing their GTeam online BIM collaboration platform and its latest mobile support on iPad as well. In addition, Digital Project was also visible though we didn’t focus on that. Andrew Witt, director of research at Gehry Technologies, also gave both Pete and I a sneak peek at something they are working on that involves 3D modeling through a web browser, and it was running on a Macbook Pro under Chrome.

Although we can’t really touch on that more than that we were impressed with the speed though a web browser and the numerical data connection to the 3D model form/volume. We will be touching base with the Gehry Technologies folks later this summer to really dive deep into what things are going on there. Look for a more detailed report on GTeam at AIA coming up.