So I am currently interning at a software development company called SolidWorks, in Cambridge, England. At this job we are encouraged to “Blog” (via WordPress) all the interesting things we come across and anything interesting that we do.

For the company’s privacy, all of these blog posts are kept internally within the company so the public cannot access them (to prevent competitors stealing our ideas). However I believe that this is a great way to not only consolidate knowledge within a company, but also for oneself. For example – there are some posts from just a few weeks ago that I know I wrote, but cannot remember all of the details – having the blog allows me to quickly reference my sometimes unreliable memory.

I see this blogging system as a virtual diary which would be great to look back on also, and so my plan is to write about things going on in my life as well as anything I notice and find interesting on the web.

So the first thing I would like to post is about the project BrickBox that we (Andy Thomas, Laura Walker, Robbie Coomber, Ryan Hamlet and I) created for our second year group project at Cambridge University. This was a 6 week long project with a presentation (see below) at the end; this was in front of the whole of the Computer Lab‘s staff and students. Our project impressed people since we “demo-ed” quite well and apparently the presentation must have been good since we were voted the “Winning Project” by the audience! (We won £50 from IBM – however due to cut backs they are not having the IBM challenge this year, that they normally have)

The idea was to see if a multi-user, multi-touch table could be used collaboratively to create models together. We created a Lego-style application that allows users to move, rotate, resize bricks, as well as manipulate the view with “pinching” and panning with a fist. This was sponsored by SolidWorks – hence the internship there this summer!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5429iENztKw[/youtube]

We were also featured on Develop3D’s blog which was fantastic as well!

I have a lot more interesting things that Robbie and I have been working on at SolidWorks this summer – but these are not ready for release yet…stay tuned!