Stimulant’s SXSW 2011 Talk Submissions on Panel Picker

We’re hoping to return to speak at SXSW in 2011 for our third year, and have two talks in the running. There’s a lot of content in these, and we’re planning to cover some new territory with respect to our previous talks. We’d love to hear what you think, and get your input on how we might address specific questions and concerns you have. Let us know, and, of course, vote!

S, M, L, XL: Scales of User Experience

It’s an era of unprecedented choice for those who design and develop software experiences. Desktop, laptop, or mobile? Personal or public installation? Wall or table display? Single-touch or multi-touch? User experience design needs to be molded to fit the right task on the right device in the right context, and making smart decisions around these issues. This panel will explore the challenges in designing, developing, and even testing applications on the biggest screens to the smallest. Topics will include resolution and legibility, physical zones of control, multi-user experiences (even on the same device) and social moderation of control, ergonomics and human factors for virtual objects, and how to make decisions around what devices make the most sense for what contexts. Not only will eye-popping and successful examples be shown, but also horribly embarrassing mistakes along the way. This intersection of disciplines is still being figured out, and best practices are still being written, and the entire audience will be inspired to fan out and help define what works, and what doesn’t, in this age of increasing overlap between public and private, solo and shared, large and small…and, of course, keyboard and touch.

‘Til Postmortem Do We Part: Bizdev for Creatives

The most creatively rewarding relationships are the ones where your partners are just as engaged as you are. But how do you find the clients and projects that are right for you? How do you sell them on your agency and win their business? And how do you prioritize which pitches to spend your efforts on? This talk will focus on the business development and account management side of interaction design. These skills range from selling an agency’s ideas, work and process to the client, to managing expectations and creativity on a deadline, to navigating political issues in large corporations, and surviving long enough to reflect upon about how to do it all better the next time. Attendees will walk away with tools to help them to assess clients and their needs from the first meeting, mitigate risk by reducing iteration time and cost while managing client expectations, rapidly assess cost and scope, and calculate the ROI of inspiration and creative magic.

SAP InSite Studio

SAP software runs many of the world’s largest enterprises. SAP’s founder, Hasso Platner, envisioned a “boardroom of the future” that would make executive-level meetings and decision making far more immediate and flexible, bolstered with at-your-fingertips data that is as current as possible. He posited: “What if you could ask any question of your business and get an answer immediately?” SAP reached out to Stimulant, Cisco and Microsoft to help them realize an answer to this question. The result was InSite Studio, unveiled at the SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Orlando.

A carousel of content is powered through multi-touch interactions for easier document sharing.

We created a multi-touch remote collaboration interface that integrated into a Cisco CTS3000 Telepresence Suite, in support of SAP’s own Co-Innovation Team. InSite Studio allows meeting participants to queue up content and literally throw applications, websites, and other documents onto one of three massive shared screens. Content can be easily adjusted with intuitive gestural UI throughout the experience. This enables a seamless mixture of HD teleconferencing and freeform screen sharing between up to twelve concurrent meeting participants.

Every user experience decision supported the streamlining of decision-making between remote collaborators, removing as much “cognitive friction” as possible from the software experience. Stimulant created an intuitive and satisfying gestural UI experience, building in the ability to “flick” or “throw” content to a desired display and to remove it just as easily with a dragging gesture. The software interface also features a curved queue of content, to make scrubbing through content physically comfortable in smooth, sweeping gestures. Applications and content are queued up before the meeting, and can be edited before being shared. Another gesture gives users the shortcut ability to reopen a previously shared application by revealing and navigating a list specific to each display.

InSite Studio integrated three multi-touch workstations into a massive teleconferencing suite.

InSite Studio showcases two different types of telepresence units. One unit features three HD multi-touch workstations built into the main telepresence suite, each usable by one or two concurrent users while seated. Above these workstations, three large monitors offer HD displays of any applications the users chooses to share, as well as live video from the remote conference location. The second has only one multi-touch workstation and three large monitors, simulating a geographically distant collaborator with less hardware. By having both of these suites available in different locations at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP was able to demonstrate the interaction of two remote offices and highlight the powerful aspects of the “boardroom of the future.”

Managing three workstations, six screens, and an unlimited number of running applications was made easy through a direct, natural user interface.

Stimulant used a variety of technologies to create the user interface. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was used for the main interface, including some of the just-released touch features in .NET 4 and the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch. WCF was used to communicate between instances of the application, low-level Win32 calls were used to manage running applications, and raw sockets were used to communicate with SAP’s custom-designed hardware. Stimulant provided an end-to-end set of services on the front end, including interaction design and visual design, hardware prototyping, qualification and integration, and development and quality assurance on the software side.

Engaging with a variety of innovative hardware and getting each piece to effectively communicate with the entire system was a satisfying challenge for Stimulant and SAP. Each multi-touch workstation was powered by a computer running Windows 7. The multi-touch workstations were 32″ Samsung LED displays paired with PQ Labs Multi-Touch G3 multi-touch overlays, surrounded by SAP-designed custom enclosures. The modular setup of the hardware was part of the success of InSite Studio, keeping the experience cost-effective and reproducible.

Modeling The World

The biggest names in supercomputing have been brought together at modelingtheworld.com.

The highest-power computational efforts on the planet are working to solve science’s hardest problems, from protein folding and gene sequencing to climate modeling and quantum physics. Stimulant helped Microsoft Technical Computing illustrate their commitment to these cutting-edge efforts with an equally cutting-edge website.

ModelingTheWorld.com is a Silverlight-based website that features interactive HD videos of some of the most respected luminaries in the supercomputing field today. 15 are available now, with more throughout the year, and each has a rich array of time-synchronized “extras” that add context to the interviewees’ statements or link to other related videos. Synchronized transcripts enable captioning and non-linear navigation.

High performance computing comes alive through the stories of its own leaders.

Stimulant designed an entirely procedural layout engine to display all of the videos, reinforced by an intelligent particle system, to evoke a complex system of many elements that form a greater whole. The system features parameters such as gravity, attraction, and elasticity that allowed design and development team members to interactively dial in the look and feel. Subtle controls also exist for featuring some videos more than others. Particles swarm to videos the user is interested in. If the user wishes to browse in a more ordered way, such as by name or tag, all the elements intelligently make room for additional interface elements as they appear.

Stimulant’s deep background in digital media also allowed us to help art direct the look of all the interviews, to ensure that the emotional tone of the videos matched the exploration and playback environments. A richly interactive video experience is offered once a video is selected for viewing, built upon our past successes for Microsoft Research’s Project Tuva. Silverlight Smooth Streaming video automatically provides the right quality level for the user’s bandwidth, immediately and in real time.

ModelingTheWorld.com is a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to advancing the state of computing on a massive scale, and reaffirms Stimulant’s not-so-secret mission to use technology to tell stories in new and engaging ways.

SAP unveils InSite Studio at SAPPHIRE Now

InSite Studio enables collaborative access to real-time business analytics from distributed locations.

We’re on-site in Orlando this week helping SAP showcase their InSite Studio initiative on the Innovations Campus, which marries in-memory computing with a large-scale, Windows 7 touch-based UI and a Cisco TelePresence System 3000. The last slide of SAP chairman Hasso Plattner’s Sapphire 2009 keynote was a sketch of this idea, and we were asked to help bring his vision to life for SAPPHIRE Now. The solution enables business decision makers to drill down into business analytics, review data and make changes from distributed locations in real-time, using SAP’s suite of business software, a variety of devices, and a bespoke multi-touch interface designed and built by Stimulant. Our UI integrates deeply with Windows 7, providing an efficient way to control and share live applications via the Cisco TelePresence System 3000, using only touch. This is a massive engineering feat, and we’re thrilled to have had the pleasure of working side-by-side with the insanely talented folks on SAP’s Chairman’s Special Projects and Design Services teams. A full case study is forthcoming, but for now, come swing by the studio at SAPPHIRE Now — we’ll be demoing every hour until Wednesday.

Project Tuva selected as a 2010 Webby Honoree

Project Tuva has been selected as an Official Honoree by the Webby Awards for the Best Use of Video or Moving Image. A big thanks to our great friends and partners at Microsoft Research for the chance to collaborate on the creation of a meaningful experience for this amazing content.

Stimulant Promoted to Microsoft Surface Strategic Partner

We’re pleased to announce (albeit somewhat belatedly) that Stimulant has achieved the highest level of partnership with Microsoft Surface, having been promoted to the strategic partner level. This honor, conveyed upon only the most committed and innovative companies, is the culmination of over three years of working with the platform. We have a long history of collaboration with the Surface team, and have also taken a design leadership role, speaking regularly about the new scenarios and interactions enabled by Surface. Our TouchTones application was the first third-party freeware application for Surface and the first application to be Certified for Microsoft Surface, and our recent creations have been leveraged by global brands and organizations. Among all agencies at this level, Stimulant is the first agency to be 100% focused on multi-touch, multi-user and Natural User Interface development. We’re honored to be recognized for our commitment and contribution to the platform, and look forward to continuing down the path of innovation.

Stimulant’s Darren David at Web 2.0: “Blurring the Lines”

Darren’s been invited to participate on the Blurring the Lines: From Human Centered Design to Customer Driven Development panel, talking shop with colleagues and stellar thought leaders Alon Salant from Carbon Five, Maria Giudice from Hot Studio, and Rob Spiro from Aardvark, moderated by our good friend Josh Damon Williams from Hot Studio. To quote our panel’s charter:

This panel investigates and drills down into the practices that designers, developers and product owners are learning to use across their disciplines to ensure they successfully deliver their vision to engaged customers.

Our panel will lay out specific guidelines on how best to accomplish this—and showcase techniques like Wizard of Oz testing and running experiments in the working product. Strategies and systems will be explored to clearly address and answer questions such as: “When and how do I do my research?”, “Am I defining a solution or a system?”, and “Will my design ever be fully realized?”

We’re on at 2:35pm on Wednesday, May 05. Hope to see you at the show.

Bing for Nokia S60

Bing Mobile Application for Nokia

In early 2008, Microsoft announced that they’d be bringing Silverlight to the Nokia S60 platform and at Mix 2010, that effort took a big step forward with the beta release of the plugin for Symbian. Stimulant, which has been working with Silverlight on mobile platforms since its inception, was chosen (along with a few other elite agencies) to participate, helping deliver applications to showcase the runtime.

The application Stimulant worked on is a mobile variant of the Bing Bar desktop application. Stimulant worked closely with the Bing team and was able to reuse a significant portion of code and existing graphic assets, while adding in mobile-specific interactivity for this unique form factor. Much of the Bing Bar’s functionality has been ported, including stocks, weather, and real-time feeds of MSN content.

Got an S60 phone? Point your mobile browser at the demo application, located at http://silverlight.net/content/samples/s60/bing, and experience Bing in the palm of your hand.