SketchUp Basecamp 2012: we brought cloud, mobile, and augmented reality

Welcome to Part 2 of my SketchUp Basecamp round-up. In Part 1, I summarized Basecamp as a whole and the announcements. Now I am going to personalize it to us, our friends at Shaderlight, and some of the great people we got to meet. SketchUcation unofficially kicked of Basecamp on Sunday night by having a mixer and we met many attendees.

Shaderlight, presented their interactive rendering plugin during a ‘Rendering Round-up” on Day 1 and in an unconference on Day 2. They were very well received and many SketchUp users got to see our Shaderlight Cloud Rendering in action. They were excited to be able to send complex animations to the cloud and to submit unlimited, simultaneous renders. To make sure Shaderlight users are never without their renders, we introduced the Shaderlight Cloud Viewer for Android devices. Don’t worry Apple users, your app is coming soon.

Shaderlight

Martin from Shaderlight presents at the 'Rendering Round-up'

Day 1 ended with SketchUp hosting a great party at the Absinthe House in Boulder. The highlight of the party was definitely SketchUp Pictionary (I forgot to take pictures since we were all too busy playing!) Two people challenged each other to draw an item in SketchUp and the audience guessed. Best 2 out of 3 won. I won with my words being “Steam engine” and “Steeple.”

On Day 2 we were invited to present in an Augmented Reality session and demonstrated our mobile app, SightSpace 3D, with a viewer and Augmented Reality. We were pleased to introduce so many people to Augmented Reality in SketchUp. Later that afternoon we also presented an unconference, Cloud 101, to cover everything from “What is the cloud?” to “How to use the cloud.”

Cloud 101

Jeff from Limitless Computing presents the Cloud 101 unconference.

On Day 3, developers went to an Advanced Ruby Conference while designers participated in a Design Charette to design an interactive classroom for an educational charity.

Aidan Chopra of SketchUp closed out the day by saying there will be a Basecamp next year! We are looking forward to it!