Maxim Integrated Touch Wall

Maxim Integrated asked Stimulant to create a large scale interactive wall in the lobby of their new corporate headquarters. Our challenge was to create a fun, engaging and brand relevant way to introduce the new brand and inform guests about the company. Challenge accepted!

The resulting experience is designed to embody the three elements set forth in Maxim’s brand redesign; inventive, bold and grounded. The interface, presented on six 55-inch displays with a multitouch overlay, is a playful interactive brand extension married with a high-level, media-rich company overview. The wall is one of the largest physical Silverlight deployments to date.

Maxim Integrated touch wall located in the corporate lobby.

To stay on our tight schedule, we exposed dozens of variables that affected the visual system (speed, density, behaviors) in a custom control panel. This let us dial in the “feel” of the piece with the client in real time, expediting communication and saving many days of back and forth on revisions. This proved so successful that it has become a regular part of our development process.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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…