Autodesk Acquires Immersive Collaboration Platform, The Wild

President of AECCafe Sanjay Gangal spoke recently with Montreal-based Nick Fonta, General Manager, XR division at Autodesk about Autodesk’s XR immersive experience and the company’s acquisition of The Wild, an immersive remote collaboration platform for architecture, design, and enterprise teams.

Sanjay: Thank you so much for joining us, Nick. So, tell us about Autodesk XR Solutions.

Nick: For sure. Autodesk has an interesting journey or history when it comes to XR. We started in the 1990s with our first project around XR, and it was a full 3D immersive experience with AutoCAD data that people could navigate into, a little bit like a first-person shooter. You could interact with basic interactions with the AutoCAD scene at the time. That was a project in prototype. And since then, we’ve been doing a lot of things, we have a research group who continued testing the limits of those technologies, but more recently, we’ve had a few things maybe worth noting. The first thing being about seven years ago, we moved into the real-time engine business, if you will, with our own engine, which was called Stingray. And we also built a first product in our trying to understand what that meant phase for Autodesk, and the product...