Stimulant Takes Top Honors at IxDA Interaction Awards 2012

Stimulant, alongside collaborator Sifteo, was honored with a pair of awards at the Interaction Design Association’s (IxDA) inaugural Interaction Design Awards at the Interaction 12 conference in Dublin on February 3rd. Our creation, LoopLoop, a groundbreaking music sequencer for tiny devices called Sifteo cubes, took top prize in ‘Best in Category, Expressing’ as well as ‘Best in Show’ among all category winners.

Sifteo cubes, the brainchild of MIT-educated President and co-founder David Merrill and CEO and co-founder Jeevan Kalanithi, are 1.5-inch-by-1.5-inch devices that can operate in tandem with up to five counterpart cubes. LoopLoop allows users to improvise their own musical tracks layered with various samples and beats by “bumping” loops onto a sequencer cube from an instrument cube. Users can manipulate the cubes – which are aware of their own orientation, tilt, direction and proximity to one another – by physically moving them or touching them to one another.

Stimulant designed LoopLoop after Sifteo invited the company to become the first third-party agency to build an application for the platform, and contribute to the launch of a portfolio of games that focus on kinesthetic learning, spatial reasoning, and collaboration.

“We wanted to give anybody the ability to make great music, whether they were talented or not,” explained Stimulant Founder and CEO Darren David. “As the first outside agency to build something for the Sifteo cubes, we wanted to change the perception that these were just child’s toys and show this could in fact serve as a development platform.”

“This was just a tremendous collaboration from start to finish,” continued David. “We’re proud to share this award with Sifteo, as our application and the interaction model of the cubes were essentially inseparable.”

“The team at Stimulant was totally in their element creating LoopLoop,” added Sifteo’s David Merrill. “We worked together to identify the type of application that would push the capabilities of our brand-new game platform to the limit, and the result is simply awesome. LoopLoop is a perfect example of the kind of virtuosic design and development success that Stimulant excels at, and we’re excited to collaborate with them again in the future.”

The dual Interaction Awards victories are especially notable when considered alongside the studio’s big-name competition, which included Microsoft, CP+B, HUGE, and R/GA among many others. “IxDA clearly featured a competitive field of companies,” noted Darren David. “We’re extremely fortunate and humbled to have been grouped with such a talented field. LoopLoop gave us the opportunity to do what we do best, which is make engaging content for brands we admire.”

Stimulant’s Sifteo cubes project follows a stream of high-profile work, including an innovative application for the Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface platform and a 168-foot-wide interactive 3D virtual life simulation for Intel’s booth at CES 2012.

Intel’s Connect to Life Experience, CES 2012

Foghorn asked us to create the interactive component for Intel’s booth at CES 2012. The result was the Intel Connect to Life Experience,  the world’s largest interactive, multi-user, real-time-3D virtual life simulation.

Stimulant's own computer vision code turned any object into the basis of a new lifeform.

Spanning the entirety of Intel’s booth, conference attendees could  use any of six custom-made stations around the perimeter of the booth to create a shape using their hands, phone, keys — pretty much anything — and the silhouette of that object was used to generate a unique bioluminescent lifeform on the massive projection surface overhead. The animated lifeforms interact with each other in playful ways, dancing with one another or chasing other lifeforms around the ecosystem.

The system rendered approximately 30 billion triangles per second to deliver a 17.6 megapixel image at 60 frames per second, all powered by Intel Core i7 technology. This system’s 16,800-pixel-wide output was displayed over a 2200 square-foot, non-uniform, projection-mapped surface using 24 projectors.

Our interactive piece was just one part of the Connect to Life Experience, made possible through a tight collaboration with Foghorn, Intel, and other supremely talented firms. It was an honor to work with such creative partners as 2LK, WorldStage, Stage Light Design, LeadDog, and The Taylor Group.

Intel Museum Redesign

Stimulant contributed seven interactive exhibits to a complete overhaul of the Intel Museum, located at Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California.

We designed and developed the software portion of the exhibits, aimed at children and adults alike, collaborating with the Taylor Group for cladding and enclosures and with Intel on content and concept. The exhibits featured 2D and real-time 3D interfaces, covering topics as diverse as Intel’s history, animated illustrations of Moore’s Law, the future of silicon photonics, exactly how small a nanometer is, and much more.  We powered each of our exhibits with a single Intel® 2^nd Generation Core processor-based PC, with no additional video hardware or GPU, granting us higher-than-video framerates at HD frame sizes.

Stimulant collaborated with some killer talent to help bring this museum refresh to life, including the Taylor Group, Group Delphi, and Globacore.

Bing for Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface

Microsoft had planned to only ship one application on the new Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface platform, and they came to Stimulant to help design and develop it. Stimulant collaborated with the Microsoft Surface team to conceive and implement exciting new ways to let multiple people collaboratively search for images and locations, while intuitive clustering algorithms make maintaining context easy.

Tagged objects can store searches for frequent and easy execution, and Microsoft Tag lets users take media, business info and directions with them on their personal device.

Intel’s Connect to Life Experience at CES 2012

2200 square feet of unique user-generated 3D bioluminescent lifeforms

We’re at CES all week overseeing what is our physically biggest project to date.

The Intel Connect to Life Experience is a 168-foot-wide interactive 3D virtual life simulation that spans the entirety of Intel’s booth at CES 2012. Conference attendees can use any of six stations around the perimeter of the booth to create a shape using their hands, phone, keys — pretty much anything — and the silhouette of that object will be used to generate a unique bioluminescent lifeform on the massive projection surface overhead. The animated lifeforms interact with one another in playful ways, dancing with one another or chasing other lifeforms around the ecosystem.

The system renders approximately 30 billion triangles per second to deliver a 17.6 megapixel image at 60 frames per second, all powered by Intel Core i7 technology. This image is displayed over a 2200 square foot, non-uniform projection-mapped surface using 24 projectors.

Stimulant’s client for the Connect to Life Experience was Foghorn, famous for bringing the incredible Intel Infoscape wall to life with Intel in 2010. We were honored to collaborate with a team that has set an incredibly high bar, and we relished the challenge to meet it. The Connect to Life Experience has been a massive collaboration between a number of other supremely creative and talented firms without whom none of this would have been possible, including (but certainly not limited to) 2LK, WorldStage, Stage Light Design and The Taylor Group.

If you’re in town for the week, swing by and make your own unique contribution to the ecosystem!

LoopLoop for Sifteo Cubes

UPDATE: LoopLoop wins “Best in Category, Expressing” and “Best in Show” at the inaugural Interaction Design Awards! Read the full press release here.

Our work at Stimulant ranges from massive interactive wall-sized installations to small handheld devices. Our friends at Sifteo gave us an amazing opportunity to work on our smallest device yet.

Designing for “Inch-Scale” Computers

Sifteo cubes, originally featured in 2009 at TED, are sturdy 1.5-inch-square devices with 1-inch screens, not unlike a child’s building block. They have an amazing tactile quality and fit well in hands of all sizes and ages. Sifteo cubes are aware of their own orientation, tilt, direction, and proximity to other Sifteo cubes. A single button is embedded underneath each cube’s 128-pixel-wide screen. They are controlled wirelessly by a nearby computer and come in packs of three (expandable up to six) cubes.

Sifteo asked us to contribute to their launch portfolio of games that focus on kinesthetic learning, spatial reasoning, and collaboration. We whittled dozens of concepts down to a project we’d all love to work on: a multitrack music toy that was more exploratory than goal-based, and would leverage the minimalist and modular nature of the cubes themselves.

Designing for cubes...with cubes.

Passion, Prototyping and Playtesting

We all love music at Stimulant. Many of us have been DJs or musicians at some point in our lives. Combining this love with our penchant for interactive, playful experiences is part of what makes coming into work so rewarding, so it wasn’t a surprise when we after much deliberation we decided to go down the path of making music.

The design team started prototyping the interaction design while our developers researched the technical constraints and possibilities of the Sifteo cubes themselves. The design began on paper, with lots of little doodles of possible screen states, and talking through the interactions between each Sifteo cube. We even used existing, physical game pieces to playtest the application without writing a line of code, and used even verbal beatboxing in lieu of actual audio output.

Bringing LoopLoop to Life

With the interaction model prototyped on paper, we began the process of laying down the technical framework and exploring our visual and audio design options. Sifteo’s development team was extremely supportive of our efforts, modifying their SDK framework and sharing our passion for what LoopLoop could become.

We opted for a visual style that would mimic the inferred emotional attributes of the Sifteo cubes themselves: cute, minimal, quirky, with surprising complexity revealed over time. This look and feel influenced the sound palette and naming of the application, which is a nod both to the onomatopoeia of the patterns, as well as the nature of how the tracks repeat themselves.

Up to six cubes can be combined for longer compositions.

The Stimulant team aggressively stuck to a “less is more” ethic when it came to features, scope, and priorities. We focused on doing fewer things, and doing them better. Iteration and fine-tuning of the technical, interactive, visual, and aural aspects of the project led us towards something that we felt was fun, engaging, and a joy to play with.

You can read more about LoopLoop on the Sifteo website, where you can also find more information on Sifteo Cubes and the Intelligent Play platform.

Social Stream for Microsoft Surface 2.0

Because we’re always intrigued by opportunities to visualize real-time data in engaging ways, Microsoft’s Surface team got our attention when they asked us to create an updated version of Event Live, their event-based social media visualizer. Our fully redesigned and rebranded Social Stream application aggregates live Tweets, images from Flickr, and news stories into a multi-directional animated “stream,” creating a real-time display of relevant social content. Multiple users can simultaneously read, rotate, and explore all of the live data on the selected topics, and can even “scrub” the stream itself backwards and forwards.

One exciting feature showcased in Live Stream is the addition of Microsoft Tags. Users can flip over any item in the stream to reveal a Microsoft Tag. When photographed with a mobile device running a tag recognition application, the tag is translated into a hyperlink that immediately takes the user to that URL in their mobile browser. It’s a quick and easy way to snapshot content that you want to save for later.

As with most of Stimulant’s projects, Social Stream has a complexity far beyond its simple end-user interface. A hidden administrative control panel can be launched by placing any object on Surface with a specific Surface byte tag attached to it. This control panel then gives an administrator the ability to adjust volume, stream speed and direction, diagnose connectivity, and ban specific topics or users from the stream (which then updates in real-time). The administrator can also enable a profanity filter and determine whether the stream populates chronologically or randomly. These advanced options are all available without having to interrupt the experience or leave the application.

Social Stream premiered at Worldwide Partner Conference where visitors to the Microsoft booth were able to watch the live chatter about the conference float by in real-time on Microsoft Surface. Participants enjoyed the new and engaging multi-user experience that highlighted immediately relevant content. Stimulant also enjoyed our first chance to create an application using Microsoft’s bold, typography-oriented Metro design language on Surface.

Best of all, the Social Stream source code is available on the Microsoft Code Gallery. Re-skinning the interface and customizing the branding elements are simple tasks, and adjusting the feed items merely requires basic editing. Stimulant is proud to have this code become publicly available, and we look forward to the creative ways in which this application will be repurposed.

WebVizBench.com

We typically spend our time in managed code, such as Silverlight, WPF, and XNA, because these technologies let us design high-performance experiences that have reach. Recently, however, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 browser caught our eye by promising a thoroughly hardware-accelerated browsing experience, especially around the new rich-media capabilities of HTML5.

Microsoft, preparing for the upcoming beta release of IE9, asked us if we’d be interested in developing an HTML5 site that would allow us to flex our design chops in a browser-based context. We’ve developed a reputation for creating digital experiences that push modern computer hardware to its limits, and this was a great opportunity to see if IE9 could live up to our expectations.

In collaboration with Microsoft and Seattle radio station KEXP, Stimulant created WebVizBench.com, an animated and interactive radio playlist visualization and benchmarking application written entirely in HTML5, optimized for Microsoft IE9, and tweaked to harness the power of GPU-enhanced Web browsing.

Over 700,000 tracks can be browsed at WebVizBench.com, thanks to KEXP.

We were incredibly fortunate to get access to an astounding historical data set from KEXP, the world-renowned independent and non-profit radio station in Seattle, Washington. The KEXP data set represents nearly 10 years of radio playlists. The data included over 700,000 tracks with album art, the date and time each song was played, and DJ names. With this rich dataset in hand, our goal was to find a visually compelling way to allow for exploration, while simultaneously seeing how far we could push the IE9 rendering engine. We decided to work backwards from the HTML5 rendering features that IE9 supported (and the list is quite comprehensive) in order to generate some objective, empirical data around IE9’s performance on various platforms. We knew that we wanted to generate a “performance score,” but we wanted that score to be based on a more “real-world” browsing experience, not a particular sub-feature of a rendering engine.

WebVizBench.com uses HTML5 features that IE9 can offload to your graphics card, for insane performance.

The resulting site, WebVizBench.com, offers the ability to browse through all tracks played on KEXP for almost the entire past decade. You can sort by time, artist, popularity, or even album color. A display options panel lets you toggle which HTML5 features are used to render the visualization, and you can see the frame rate change based on your system’s CPU (and GPU, if you’ve got one) power. Running the benchmark takes your system through an elaborate script of manipulating all the KEXP data, using different combinations of rendering options in an attempt to push your system to the limit and generate an objective performance score.

Speaking of numbers, we did some testing in our development and found that IE9 really does take full advantage of the GPU when present. IE9 limits rendering at 60 frames per second (fps), since most screens don’t refresh at higher than 60Hz. Therefore, we designed our benchmark so that even today’s highest-end machines wouldn’t hit this upper frame rate limit. Your results may vary, but here are our initial frame-rate findings for different graphics cards in the same computer (with a Core i3 530 CPU).

• 12.43fps with no GPU, built-in graphics
• 13.04fps with GeForce 210
• 21.88fps with Radeon 5750
• 23.51fps with GeForce GTS 450
• 22.03fps with Radeon 5770
• 24.20fps with GeForce GTX 460
• 24.59fps with GeForce GTX 480

We’d love for you to try out WebVizBench.com (feel free to tweet your results to @stimulant). If you haven’t grabbed IE9 yet, you can do so here. Even for us, having designed and built this application, it’s still hard to believe everything you’re seeing is done without a plug-in – it’s just HTML and JavaScript.

You can learn more about IE9 and its features at BeautyOfTheWeb.com.

Intel Museum Redesign Launched

Intel has defined innovation in the technology industry since its founding in 1968. Stimulant joined forces with the Taylor Group, GGE, and Globacore to help celebrate this history by revamping the Intel Museum, located at Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California.

Stimulant contributed seven interactive exhibits to the museum. We designed and developed the software portion of the exhibits, collaborating with the Taylor Group for cladding and enclosures and with Intel on content and concept. The exhibits featured 2D and 3D interfaces that ranged from highlights of Intel’s history to illustrations of Moore’s Law. It was a nearly year-long effort that was one of the most rewarding projects we’ve done to date.

We powered each of our exhibits with a single Intel® 2^nd Generation Core processor-based PC, with no additional video hardware or GPU, granting us higher-than-video framerates at HD frame sizes. We were thrilled with this uptick in performance with much lower cost, power usage, and heat.

The revamped Intel Museum is now open to the public!

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.