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.

Tim Sneath has a post on 15 new things in .NET 3.5, most notable (to me, at least) being some long-awaited animation fixes, XLINQ support (finally!) and support for XBAPs in Firefox.

Been kinda quiet here on the posting front as I rapidly dive into Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 simultaneously, so expect some impressions there soon…

Dwayne Need has a fantastic post (with source code) on how to enable non-interactive Visual elements to run in separate threads. His summary:

In general, objects in WPF can only be accessed from the thread that created them. Sometimes this restriction is confused with the UI thread, but this is not true, and it is perfectly fine for objects to live on other threads. But it is not generally possible to create an object on one thread, and access it from another. In almost all cases this will result in an InvalidOperationException, stating that “The calling thread cannot access this object because a different thread owns it.”

[snip]

In this demo I’ve shown how to use the HostVisual and VisualTarget classes to compose pieces of UI from different threads. There are some limitations: namely that the UI owned by the worker threads do not receive input events. There were also some annoyances we had to work around along the way, but those proved to be fairly minimal.

Multithreading has been a big barrier for me, coming from the Flash world, especially since TMTOWTDI. BackgroundWorkers are very powerful and easy to get my head around, but seem to be task-oriented as opposed to long-running-process-oriented. Creating real Threads and understanding exactly what’s going on there is still a bit beyond my understanding, though. Can anyone recommend a reference that walks one through the basics of multithreading in .NET, assuming little to no knowledge to start with?

Here are some more videos of the HP Interactive Canvas (from Obscura Digital via YouTube):

Still waiting to get a hold of the video with Martha Stewart…