source: villains.wikia.com

Some technology previews are big. Others are small. The number of desired participants on a technology preview is determined by the team providing the technology. This is based on their desire to get a representative sample of customers who may have an interest in the technology plus the amount of time these teams plan on processing the feedback. After all, these teams do have day jobs. Typically they are parts of the development efforts of AutoCAD, Inventor, Fusion 360, Revit, InfraWorks, 3ds Max, or Maya. The teams often conduct technology previews on the side to validate an incremental or radical innovation they have dreamed up. Let me tell you, it's no fairytale: Too few participants, and they don't get the validation; too many participants and the feedback takes more time to respond to than allotted.

Here are the active technology previews on Autodesk Labs and how they are doing on participation.

Don't let the scale fool you - it's a logarithmic scale. I did that to highlight the deltas. You can actually ignore the numbers. What's important to take from this is that although you are welcome to join any technology preview, here are the technology previews that would really welcome your participation. Please use the images below as hyperlinks to find out more about them.

Part of my job is to blog and use other types of social media to raise awareness of all technology previews to attract the right number of project participants. When a technology preview comes up short, that does not look good for me, Al Franken. [The youth of today will not understand the reference.]

A participation request is alive in the lab.