Archive for the ‘Case Study’ Category
GMNext Touch Displays
Inside this pavilion were five interactive stations with their interfaces projected on glass, creating a
Many clients come to us referring to the interfaces from the film Minority Report. GM literally meant it, though, when they asked Obscura Digital for see-through touchscreen interfaces on glass for the NAIAS 2008 Conference in Detroit.
GM Greenbuild Touchwall
Three screens, three projectors, 4.6 million pixels, hundreds of minutes of video...all helping tell GM's sustainability story at the Greenbuild Conference.
GM had a sustainability story to tell for the Greenbuild conference — and the content to back it up — but they needed a way to put it together and make it compelling to the general public. Obscura Digital asked us to create a multi-touch, drag-and-drop interface that was informative, inspiring, and fun.
HP Interactive Canvas
The world's largest touchwall interface: 128 square feet? Many fingers? One UI? Four weeks? No problem!
We built the user interface for what was, at the time, the world’s largest interactive multi-touch wall. In four weeks. With no prior multi-touch experience.
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.
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.
Microsoft Local Impact Map: Surface Edition
Stimulant followed up the excellent reception of the Microsoft Local Impact Map Silverlight with a special edition for Microsoft Surface. Drawing on our previous experience with many Surface projects, we saw incredible value in presenting this application in a new medium.
We knew that the Local Impact Map would be used to facilitate conversations about corporate social responsibility between Microsoft and representatives of governments and NGOs. How could we make the map even more collaborative, emotionally engaging, and aid in forming strong conversations around corporate citizenship?
The challenge called out for a fresh approach: build a version of the Local Impact Map for Microsoft Surface. In this way, Microsoft representatives can kick off interactions with their government and NGO contacts, letting them learn how to use the application simply by watching, and then let them explore the map as the conversation continues. All the while, the participants are literally able to look each other in the eye, and neither is in exclusive control of the device, the software, or the content. This makes for an emotionally equitable experience for all concerned. This human emotional connection and transparent communication style is exactly what Microsoft wanted to convey.
The Local Impact Map: Surface Edition shares the same hand-made look and feel as the online application, and is fed by the exact same data sources. We completely refactored the interface to make the Local Impact Map appropriate for Surface, and this laid the groundwork for further innovation.
A photo of the application, showing a data visualization lens
We chose the metaphor of a lens as the cornerstone of our multi-user interface strategy. Onscreen lenses allow for viewing in greater detail. Each lens can even display different styles of data visualization from other lenses, rather than repainting the entire screen with a data visualization that only one user might be interested in. This also allows local content to be freely oriented towards any user. Global filters allow users to hone in on the citizenship topics that matter most to their constituents and communities. Rich support for photography and videos also helps put faces on those helped by Microsoft’s charitable efforts worldwide.
The Microsoft Local Impact Map: Surface Edition is rolled out on Surface units in Microsoft facilities all over the globe.
Project Tuva
Project Tuva is an interactive video application developed for Microsoft Research. It wraps up many of our team’s passions in one project: history, interactive video, education, science, and rich internet applications. We are thrilled to be part of the team that brought this exciting video portal to life.
Project Tuva is an interactive video experience that makes learning about science relevant and exciting through annotations authored by researchers and subject-matter experts. Project Tuva launched with Richard Feynman’s Messenger Series lectures, a cornerstone set of seven talks at Cornell University in 1964. These videos are enhanced with a number of different layers of contextual information: fully-searchable transcripts and captions, time-synchronized contextual “extras” that link to related web resources, the ability to take notes while watching, integration with Microsoft Research’s own amazing World Wide Telescope project, and more. More…
Creating interaction beyond the computer.
From desktop to device, multi-touch to gestural and portable to permanent, Stimulant crafts magical experiences for computers that don't look like computers.