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 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.

Bill Gates, a longtime admirer of Feynman’s ability to make science approachable and fun, secured the rights to footage of Feynman’s Messenger lectures. Microsoft Research made this lecture series even more relevant and evocative by adding interactive visualizations, bibliographic references, web links, commentaries by subject matter experts, and even the ability to take notes while watching.

Stimulant then provided refinements to Project Tuva’s initial interaction design, created a minimal and modern visual design, established systems for content management and editing, and developed the Silverlight online user experience. We aimed to create a flexible and reductionist visual design language that would let content be king and the video viewing experience take center stage. The app is built to scale over time, as the Feynman videos are just the tip of the iceberg.

Project Tuva is notable on several technology fronts as well. Written in Silverlight, it uses Smooth Streaming to dynamically switch between different bit rates of video without interrupting playback. This allows the video to play in a way that’s more immediate than the usual buffer-then-watch online video experience. It uses a sophisticated and fully liquid layout system to adapt to different screen sizes and viewing aspect ratios. All modifications the user makes to the interface’s layout are remembered between sessions. The entire application is, like most of our work, wholly data-driven, leaving many possibilities for future content needs and enhancements.

One of the best aspects of this project was, in fact, our clients. Microsoft Research is full of extremely passionate, brilliant, and funny people. They brought amazing ideas to the table and really made us deliver only our best work, which is just the kind of challenge we relish. Stimulant extends kudos to their entire team for giving us the opportunity to help bring Project Tuva to life. Project Tuva debuted at the 2009 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.

Experience Microsoft Research Project Tuva online for yourself.

The Local Impact Map shows the community-level, positive human and economic impacts of Microsoft's citizenship efforts around the globe.

Stimulant loves technology that tells a story and makes a difference, so we were especially thrilled when the Microsoft corporate citizenship team asked us to design and build the Microsoft Local Impact Map, which details hundreds of stories about the positive human and economic impacts Microsoft makes around the globe.

We used Microsoft’s own technologies, especially Silverlight and Deep Zoom, to create a map whose look and behavior keeps the focus on what matters most: the positive impact throughout the world made by the corporate citizenship and responsibility programs at Microsoft.

Working closely with representatives from Microsoft’s Corporate Affairs, Citizenship, Branding, Environment, and Research groups, the Local Impact Map evolved out of a need to have a central, public showcase for stories – text, video, and images – that communicated the broad reach of Microsoft’s programs.

We also implemented a feature called “snapshots,” which allows users to “bookmark” any state of the application, so that the content can be sequenced and used as a presentation tool.

We’d like to especially call attention to Microsoft’s willingness to expose this content in a UI that looks hand-drawn and slightly imperfect, reflecting those human attributes that make life wonderfully unpredictable and beautiful. It made the project a complete joy to work on, and we think it exposes a side of Microsoft – its brand and its people – that many people don’t often get to see.

Check it out online!

Your Reebok Homepage

Stimulant collaborated with online retail experts Fluid, Inc. to create an interactive 3D sphere for Reebok’s customized product page. This sphere is a rich, data-driven visualization of users of Reebok’s customized shoe system (also designed and developed by Fluid) and the designs these users have created.

Stimulant provided final interaction design polish and all 3D technical execution of Fluid’s design concepts. Fluid’s an awesome bunch and a great team to collaborate with. It was a good exercise to keep our 3D chops nice and sharp.

Belated kudos also go out to Carat Interactive, who drives the overall Reebok.com look and feel (which was refreshed and relaunched this year).

Using Silverlight to promote Silverlight on Silverlight.net...we love recursive projects!

Silverlight is seen as Microsoft‘s answer to Flash, but being a new technology, driving adoption is key. Stimulant partnered with StepChange to create an interactive, juried showcase of leading rich internet applications for their flagship platform site, Silverlight.net…using Silverlight to promote Silverlight.

The tag cloud in the Silverlight Showcase

In doing so, we wrote our own framework to make developing in Silverlight faster and more efficient. Our end deliverable was extensible, wholly data-driven, and utterly bulletproof…and our framework made it happen quickly and efficiently. It was much more analogous to writing code for Windows Presentation Foundation, or even Flash, than raw Javascript, greatly accelerating our development process.

Our interaction design needed to support a nascent site at launch, but had to expand to showcase potentially thousands of applications as Silverlight adoption increased. Users are able to sort and filter the featured Silverlight applications by location, tag, rating, and much more.

This data visualization on Silverlight.net underscored the RIA potential of Silverlight 1.0.

Silverlight isn’t just a way to deliver video (although it’s brilliant at that); one can use it to build all manner of rich internet applications (RIAs). Microsoft needed a way to show off the RIA possibilities of Silverlight in a context that highlighted the platform itself.

A zoomed-in view of the map

While Silverlight 1.0 was well known for having solid video playback performance, no projects to date had highlighted its potential to make visually rich internet applications and data visualizations.

Stimulant, in partnership with StepChange, designed and developed an interactive, map-based data visualization of interesting data sets on a truly global scale. From broadband penetration to Silverlight plugin adoption, our visualization spans all the countries of the world with intelligence, insight, and beauty.