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…

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.

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!