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Autodesk

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Autodesk
Information
Type Public company
Industry Design software, Computer-aided design
Founded January 30, 1982
Founder John Walker, Dan Drake
Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States
Notable Personnel Andrew Anagnost (President and CEO)
Products AutoCAD, Revit, Autodesk Fusion, Inventor, Maya, 3ds Max, VRED, Arnold
Website https://www.autodesk.com


Autodesk, Inc. is an American software company that makes design, engineering, and entertainment-content tools used across architecture, construction, manufacturing, and media. It was founded on January 30, 1982 by John Walker, Dan Drake, and a group of other programmers, and its first product, the computer-aided design program AutoCAD, shipped later that year.[1] The company is headquartered at One Market Plaza in San Francisco, California, trades publicly on the Nasdaq under the ticker ADSK, and reported revenue of 7.21 billion US dollars and about 14,300 employees for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026.[1] Andrew Anagnost is president and chief executive officer.[2]

Autodesk is relevant to Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality because several of its 3D tools generate the geometry and scenes that feed immersive workflows, and because it ships and has acquired products built specifically for VR and AR. Its automotive visualization tool VRED runs design reviews directly inside VR headsets, its building information modeling (BIM) tool Revit is a common source for architectural VR and AR walkthroughs, and its Maya and 3ds Max content-creation tools are widely used to build assets for VR and AR experiences.[3][4] In March 2022 the company acquired the Extended Reality platform The Wild, including IrisVR, to build out its XR offering for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) market.[5]

Company background

Autodesk grew from AutoCAD into a portfolio organized around design and make workflows. AutoCAD remains its flagship CAD product and, with Revit, is widely used by architects and engineers to draft and model buildings.[1] The company serves architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment customers, and most of its products are now sold by subscription.[1] Its content-creation tools Maya and 3ds Max, both originating in the 1990s, are standard software for film visual effects, animation, and video-game art, and Autodesk also develops the Arnold renderer.[4][1]

VRED

VRED is Autodesk's 3D visualization tool for the automotive industry. It converts CAD data into photorealistic imagery and interactive presentations for design review and virtual prototyping, and it has been a long-running tool for automotive design visualization.[3] VRED is one of Autodesk's most directly VR-oriented products: it supports head-mounted display output so that designers can evaluate full-scale vehicle models in Virtual Reality.[3]

For VR headsets, VRED uses the OpenVR SDK and runs on SteamVR-compatible hardware. Autodesk's documentation describes using the HTC Vive family through an OpenVR HMD mode that requires Valve's SteamVR runtime, and when a Vive controller is detected VRED renders a tracked hand and supports teleportation, pointer interaction, and menu navigation for design review.[6] With VRED Pro and Design 2020.2, the software added support for the HTC Vive Pro Eye headset to drive eye-tracked Foveated rendering in its OpenGL pipeline, a technique that concentrates rendering detail where the user is looking; this required an NVIDIA graphics card based on the Turing architecture.[6]

Autodesk has positioned VRED for collaborative review in which multiple participants join the same virtual model. Vendors and customers have demonstrated this at scale: VR display maker VRgineers integrated its headsets with VRED for automotive design, and automakers have built shared VR evaluation rooms where many stakeholders inspect a car model together.[7]

VRED 2026, released in October 2025, added a Vulkan renderer alongside the existing OpenGL real-time pipeline. The Vulkan path introduces hybrid ray tracing (combining rasterization with GPU-accelerated ray tracing for reflections, ambient occlusion, and environment shadows) and a GPU-driven pipeline. Autodesk's engineers say the change was driven in part by the difficulty of delivering smooth XR experiences with complex models as headset resolution and refresh rates rose, and that scenes which were not feasible in the OpenGL path can run at over 100 frames per second under Vulkan.[3]

Revit and BIM in VR and AR

Revit is Autodesk's BIM application for designing and documenting buildings. Because Revit models carry full-scale geometry and project data, they are a common starting point for architectural and construction VR and AR. Third-party plugins and platforms convert Revit models into immersive walkthroughs: tools in this category let teams review a building at 1:1 scale in a VR headset or overlay it on a real site in AR before construction.[8]

Autodesk previously shipped its own Revit-to-VR product, Autodesk Live (later Revit Live), a cloud service that turned Revit models into interactive, navigable experiences viewable on headsets such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.[9] Autodesk discontinued the Revit Live service effective March 30, 2020, after which it was removed from the Architecture, Engineering and Construction Collection.[10]

Acquisition of The Wild and IrisVR

On March 24, 2022, Autodesk announced a definitive agreement to acquire The Wild, a cloud-connected Extended Reality platform for the AEC industry. The deal included IrisVR, the maker of the Prospect VR coordination tool, which The Wild had itself acquired in 2021.[5][11]

The Wild lets architecture, engineering, and construction teams present, review, and collaborate on projects together in shared immersive sessions from different locations, while IrisVR's Prospect focuses on design coordination, issue tracking, and exploring BIM data in VR. The combined platform connects to Autodesk's own tools, including Revit, Navisworks, and BIM 360, as well as to Rhino and SketchUp, and runs across VR headsets (Oculus, SteamVR, and Windows Mixed Reality devices), Windows and macOS desktops, and iOS-based AR.[11] Autodesk's stated reason for the acquisition was that XR had become a business requirement for design and construction, and Andrew Anagnost described XR as an important part of Autodesk's platform strategy.[5]

Maya and 3ds Max for VR and AR content

Maya and 3ds Max are used to model, texture, and animate assets that are then taken into game engines and VR or AR applications. Both export through the FBX interchange format, and Autodesk and Unity have worked together to keep that asset pipeline aligned between the two companies' tools.[4][12] 3ds Max has shipped a real-time component, 3ds Max Interactive, that lets users experience 3D content on multiple platforms including VR and AR devices, and Autodesk has offered an immersive concept-design add-in, Create VR for Maya, that lets designers sketch form directly in Virtual Reality using VR controllers.[13][14]

Maya is also extended for VR work by third-party software. The MARUI plugin loads into Maya and lets artists edit a Maya scene in real time from inside a VR headset using motion controllers.[15] It works with Oculus and SteamVR-compatible headsets including the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality devices, Pimax, and Varjo, and supports Leap Motion hand input.[16]

Products relevant to VR and AR

Product Category VR / AR relevance
VRED Automotive 3D visualization Native VR design review via OpenVR / SteamVR; supports HTC Vive and eye-tracked foveated rendering on Vive Pro Eye; Vulkan renderer added in VRED 2026 for smoother XR[3][6]
Revit Building information modeling Source models for architectural VR and AR walkthroughs and on-site AR overlays via plugins and the former Autodesk / Revit Live service[8][9]
The Wild (with IrisVR) AEC XR collaboration Multi-user immersive design review and BIM coordination across VR headsets and iOS AR; acquired by Autodesk in 2022[5][11]
Maya 3D modeling and animation Builds VR and AR assets; extended for in-headset editing by the MARUI plugin and an immersive Create VR add-in[4][15]
3ds Max 3D modeling and animation Asset creation for game engines; 3ds Max Interactive runs real-time content on VR and AR devices[4][13]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "Autodesk". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk.
  2. ↑ "Autodesk, Inc. Form DEF 14A (Proxy Statement)". April 29, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000769397/000076939726000030/adsk-20260429.htm.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 "Autodesk VRED 2026: How Autodesk Revolutionized Visualization with Vulkan". October 14, 2025. https://www.khronos.org/blog/autodesk-vred-2026-how-autodesk-revolutionized-visualization-with-vulkan.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 "How to create VR content by using Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max". https://www.instavr.co/articles/general/how-to-create-vr-contents-by-using-autodesk-maya-and-3ds-max.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 "Autodesk to Acquire The Wild, Extended Reality (XR) Solutions Provider for Immersive and Collaborative Workspaces for Design and Construction". March 24, 2022. https://adsknews.autodesk.com/en/news/autodesk-acquires-the-wild/.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "Using the HTC VIVE with VRED". https://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/2022/ENU/VRED-VR-and-VR-Setup/files/VRED_VR_and_VR_Setup_Using_the_HTC_Vive_with_VRED_html.html.
  7. ↑ "VRgineers and Autodesk VRED Put High-Performance Auto Designing on the VR Superhighway". July 25, 2018. https://vrgineers.com/2018/07/25/vrgineers-and-autodesk-vred-put-high-performance-auto-designing-on-the-vr-superhighway/.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Extended Reality in Construction: A Guide to AR, VR, and MR". https://www.autodesk.com/blogs/construction/extended-reality-construction-ar-vr-mr/.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "From Revit to VR - Autodesk Revit Live 2.0". https://aecmag.com/news/from-revit-to-vr-autodesk-revit-live-2-0/.
  10. ↑ "Autodesk will discontinue the Revit Live service". March 2020. https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-educators-read-only/autodesk-will-discontinue-the-revit-live-service/td-p/9166320.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 "Autodesk to acquire The Wild to boost XR capabilities". March 25, 2022. https://aecmag.com/vr-mr/autodesk-to-acquire-the-wild/.
  12. ↑ "Unity Technologies Collaborates with Autodesk to Strengthen the Link Between Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya". https://unity.com/news/unity-technologies-collaborates-autodesk-strengthen-link-autodesk-3ds-max-and.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 "About 3ds Max Interactive". https://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/2021/DEU/Max-Interactive-Help/interactive_help/about_3ds_max_interactive.html.
  14. ↑ "Autodesk Create VR for Autodesk Maya". https://apps.autodesk.com/MAYA/en/Detail/Index?id=3751509454670639690.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 "MARUI Plugins Bring VR Support To Popular 3D Tools Maya and Blender". https://www.uploadvr.com/marui-plugins-bring-vr-support-to-3d-tools-maya-and-blender/.
  16. ↑ "MARUI 4". https://www.marui-plugin.com/marui4/.
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