It seems that some unsavory character found an exploit in Wordpress and managed to inject some not-so-nice code into one of my recent posts, which prompted Google to put me on their list of “known attack sites”. Apologies to those who tried to visit during those dark days — tracking down the exploit and restoring golden status with Google was anything less than simple. Anyway, Wordpress has been upgraded, so we should be in the free and clear. Thanks for your patience!

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!

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.

Starting to feel a bit like all I’m doing is posting about the work we’ve been doing, but truth be told, we’ve been quite busy as of late!

The silverlight.net customer showcase, built using Silverlight 1.0, enables users to rate , sort and browse Silverlight applications by category, country/region, tag and free search terms. Additionally, members of the Silverlight community can submit their applications for inclusion in the Showcase, and rate others’ work.

The previous Showcase had reached its breaking point and wasn’t scaling to keep up with all of the applications being developed. We architected an additive filtering system that disables any selections that would return an empty set of results — all of the filtering happens on the client side, not on the server. Microsoft was also very interested in highlighting the global reach of Silverlight, so countries and regions receive prominent display and filtering UI. Users can rate applications using a familiar rating paradigm.

Once again, the Step Change Group were rockstars on the backend, while we tackled UI design and all aspects of Silverlight development. We spent a good amount of time getting to know the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX library, leaning on it quite heavily to provide a solid infrastructure for development. All good things, expect more notes on our learnings and findings very soon.

The Microsoft Expression Feature Browser is a Silverlight-based RIA that provides a simple way for users to compare the highlights of the tools in the Microsoft Expression Suite.

This is our first Silverlight 1.0 project in the wild, executed in conjunction with the Step Change Group in Portland, OR. The app is completely data-driven, allowing Microsoft to use the same Silverlight application across all four product pages in the Expression Studio. The app parses runtime configuration variables passed in on the query string, and pulls from the very same XML data source used to build the non-Silverlight version of the page. In this way, the site can downgrade gracefully for platforms that don’t have an available plugin. All assets are shared with the HTML version as well, further lessening maintenance overhead.

We were particularly impressed with the butter-smooth framerates in the native Silverlight animation engine. Turns out it’s pretty straightforward to execute programmatic animations without a lot of code. It was also really quite simple to implement a full-featured, reskinnable, inline video player. No complaints with Silverlight, though it’s definitely taken some serious gear-grinding to switch from C# to JavaScript!