Look or Feel is now Stimulant -AND- Announcing MIXr, Mobile Social Networking in Silverlight
Judging from the date of my last blog post, it’s obvious that we’ve been pretty heads-down over here for the past few months. However, it has all paid off, and I’m ecstatic to announce that Look or Feel has been realigned, retooled and reborn as Stimulant. I’m joined in partnership by long-time collaborator and confidant Nathan Moody, who will serve as Design Director. Stimulant is a digital experience design & development firm specializing in crafting memorable interactions for uncommon devices and contexts. Our new url is http://stimulant.io.
Now, if you’re reading this message, then we most likely *just* finished presenting MIXr — our realtime, mobile-based social networking application — at Scott Guthrie’s MIX08 keynote. MIXr’s sole purpose in life is to help users to figure out where the party is at *right this instant.*
It’s a fully data-driven, touchscreen-based application, running on Silverlight for Windows Mobile 6. It aggregates user ratings, such as a venue’s mood, line length, and music, and uses interactive data visualization to make it easy to figure out what’s hot and what’s not. Notable is that it’s the first gesture-based Silverlight UI on a mobile device.
We’re clearly excited about not only Silverlight 2.0 (WPF goodness is finally here!), but that Microsoft’s deal with Nokia really cements Silverlight’s future as a serious contender. Big props to everyone on the Silverlight team.
If you’re at MIX08, feel free to give us a shout at mix08@stimulant.io. And expect more frequent posts in this (or a new) space soon!
2 comments Edit | TrackbackWPF Databinding with XLinq
Bea Costa has a fantastic post this morning on using XLinq in XAML to facilitate databinding. I have to say, I’m still partial to generating CLR objects from XML, especially when I have full control over the schema and data source, but it’s nice to see another elegantly designed tool that follows existing syntax conventions.
Oh, and nice new blog skin, Bea!
5 comments Edit | TrackbackRecent Work: GM Multitouch Wall
We recently acquired some high-quality media documenting our latest project (thank to our friends over at 24g), which lends itself to a much more compelling post. We were engaged by Obscura Digital to create a multi-touch UI for General Motors for the Greenbuild Conference in Chicago. Similar in concept to the HP Interactive Canvas, Obscura engineered an all new rig that measured 18 feet x 5.5 feet, with 3 independent interaction areas, each driven by a separate CPU and projector.
(click image for full-size shot)
The rig was fully self-contained, and had its own custom-crafted “travel case”. Just box it up and roll it on to a semi. Obscura also significantly improved the touch tracking this time around, with a combination of improved software, setup optimizations, and a new cocktail for the film on front. Like butter!
The app leveraged our existing WPF-based Multitouch framework, and featured playful drag-and-drop interactions, large “swiping” motions to navigate through content and some mild particle physics. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of the ergonomic design of large-format multitouch apps (low-dpi + big screen + close proximity = severe UX challenges), and are starting to fold some of these learnings back in to the framework.
Each “silo” highlighted a different aspect of GM’s efforts in exploring alternative fuels and greening their vehicles and production processes. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a video does a much better job of storytelling.
This video is from the Greenbuild Conference, the other shots are from the 2007 Electric Vehicle Show in Anaheim, CA ,where the wall surfaced for a repeat performance.
5 comments Edit | TrackbackMicrosoft releases Volta
I’ve been following Script# for a while now, but it seemed not-just-quite ready for prime time. Now it seems that Volta has taken over. Not unlike Google’s Web Toolkit, it lets you write in the .NET language of your choice and emits Javascript in its stead. I can see this being something of a boon for Silverlight 1.0 developers, but with Silverlight 2.0 announced (and it’s inevitable creep towards parity with WPF), we’ll see what happens. Maybe it’s time to port our Silverlight framework over and see how it holds up…
No comments Edit | TrackbackSeam Carving in .NET
Mike Swanson ( of Illustrator-to-XAML exporter-plugin fame, my most-used AI plugin to date) just released some bits implementing seam carving in .NET. Very impressive. I’m anxious to see if and how this can be segued in with live code, especially in a multitouch scenario.
2 comments Edit | Trackback