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!

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.

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…