Microsoft Interviews Dominic Espinosa
Posted by Lindsay Ruthven – September 20, 2010Just recently Vectorform’s Dominic Espinosa gave an interview with Microsoft. Watch the interview from the link below and learn about Dominic’s experience developing an interactive website for the Associated Press, which takes full advantage of the latest web standards and technologies supported in Internet Explorer 9.
Microsoft Showcase: Developer Interview With Vectorform
Anaglyph Compositing
Posted by John Einselen – September 16, 2010Earlier this year I was working on some interactive demos at Vectorform that needed stereoscopic delivery. With Avatar, Up, and many other stereo movies being released, requests for 3D imagery were proliferating quickly, and I needed to develop a pipeline that could quickly and reliably deliver stereoscopic imagery for home, mobile, and specialised device delivery. Realtime processing in Apple’s Quartz Composer made it easy to quickly mock up and revise my compositing techniques, setting up compositing rules that were later ported into After Effects and Photoshop tutorials, and in-house plugins for After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Motion via FxFactory Pro.
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Stereoscopic Cameras
Posted by John Einselen – September 14, 2010Vectorform is always working on the latest tech, be it unreleased hardware or the most popular multitouch platforms from Microsoft, Apple, 3M, HP, and others. We work with some of the top players in the industry, and earlier this year we got to develop stereoscopic demos on the Microsoft Surface. In preparation for productions like this, I worked on pipeline solutions for developing, creating, and finishing stereo imagery.
There are of course multiple ways to deliver a stereoscopic experience; linear and circular polarised glasses paired with filtered projection (IMAX and Disney RealD), lenticular or masked parallax displays (such as Sharp 3D or the Nintendo 3Ds), and many more, including the easiest and oldest — anaglyphic. While I’ll discuss anaglyphic compositing in some upcoming articles, this tutorial covers some of the actual camera setups and rendering tricks needed to create stereoscopic imagery in the first place. Generating content for stereoscopy (left and right sides) is universal, regardless of delivery mechanism, so this tutorial should be suitable for any system you’re working with.
Two schools of thought
Dynamic Paper Cutouts
Posted by John Einselen – December 14, 2009While stop motion can be a fantastic medium, the process is too slow for many productions. Even for simple elements, like wrinkled paper, the time it takes to do things physically is often untenable; for the Microsoft PowerPivot online advertising campaign, Vectorform required lightening quick turnaround on visual elements and animation revisions, often on an hour by hour basis.
This is how the paper cutout effects were designed and generated dynamically using Adobe After Effects.
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Lipsyncing with Papagayo
Posted by John Einselen – December 7, 2009Using freely available tools, lipsyncing a character in Adobe After Effects doesn’t have to be a pain. Papagayo is an open source app for breaking a script down into phonemes and syncing the pieces to an audio track, while LipSync is an OS X dashboard widget that helps translate the resulting moho switch files into After Effects keyframes.
The workflow was developed at Vectorform as part of the production pipeline for Microsoft’s PowerPivot online advertising campaign (to see how the torn effects were created, check out Dynamic Paper Cutouts).
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CES 2009
Posted by Vectorform – January 10, 2009First off: Wow!
Vectorform has had a blast at CES. Our NBC Universal apps and the managed experience has been a huge hit. The NBC reps handed out 2GB SD disc jump drives in a Surface tagged package that were coded so that as people set down their package, they either received a notice saying “Winner” and received really cool novelties like a toaster powered by USB, or another message to visit the wall of media to download content to their new jumps. People were fanatic about it and NBC ran out of jump drives at the middle of day two. Mobbed! So, today people are slowing down to take the time to interact with the Surface and discover the content, which is really the magic of it.
Now I’m taking a little break here to blog from the NBC blogger lounge, appreciate the gratuity of the NBC folks over the past few days as well as throughout our projects with them and to view the crowds’ continued interest in the Surface. People are really taking the time to engage with NBC’s content, likely spending more time with it then they may have in the past and having a better experience overall. Adding a whole new dimension to what media can do to people by adding the sense of touch to sight, audio and emotional connections. Its just the beginning of something really big in the Multi-touch realm. As we wrap up here, things seem to be a little more quite today. We are continuing to meet some fascinating people and see interesting technologies.
Me? I’m getting geared up for what lays in wait for us at the NRF…not necessarily geared up for the red-eye that I’m catching tonight. More from New York tomorrow!
Happy New Year from Vectorform!
Posted by Vectorform – January 9, 2009So what is 2009 going to bring? Well if our January antics are the prelude, we’re in for quite a show. Starting off with turning 10 years old, showing off a new brand identity, our first iPhone app, CodeMash in Cleveland, CES in Vegas, NRF in New York and wrapping it up with the 2009 NAIAS in our hometown of Detroit…Whew! It’s a wonder we were able to look out the window and see the snow fall in December, well there’s no snow at our Hyderabad office, but you know what I mean.
Details? Well, I’m going to take a little liberty to sneak outside of the ‘Surface Only’ blog for a moment…
*10 years old: Growing up and in need of a new brand identity. What did we find out? Vectorform has become a place where employees feel comfortable and valued, like a family, and that creates a culture that is innovative and exciting, with people who are passionate about the work that they do and supported to bust out and try new things, meeting employee and client needs alike. Happy Birthday, Vectorform!
*iPhone: Debuting in the iPhone app business with the SurfaceDJ, and it looks like it’s being picked up at a good rate. Definitely more to come in this realm.
*CodeMash in Sandusky, Ohio: Our lead Tech Dev., Joe Engalan will be speaking at 11am on Thursday, Jan 8th about multi-touch developing and demonstrating apps that we’ve been working on.
*CES in Las Vegas: already making a splash with our NBC SurfaceDJ in the NBC booth, you just have to check out Al Roker’s dance moves. Yeah, it’s for entertainment…but just think if each little head were bits of information that were being passed around the world?
*NRF New York, NY: This year Microsoft invited Vectorform to take part in their future of music concept store “Sonic” at the National Retail Federation “The Big Show” in New York at the Javits Center. Adapting one of our retail prototypes to match the music realm, we’ll be featuring not only a Surface app, but also a Windows7 application featured on a TouchTV Networks screen. Yeah, Big Stuff….
*Last, and certainly not least..NAIAS in Detroit, Michigan we’ve been brewing a good one. For what feels like a really, really long time we’ve given up, and missed like crazy, some of our swankiest developers to work onsite at Chrysler on a top secret integrated multi-touch development that will be unveiled at the 2009 NAIAS in Detroit…that’s still all we can say! Be sure to check it out!
For now, that’s what we have going on. In the little moments when we come up for air, we’ll keep blogging with the happenings in the tech world.
Thanks for stopping by!
Beemin’ a Surface Auto Configuration
Posted by Vectorform – December 3, 2008It all started with the BMW x6 Surface Configurator Prototype. We kicked that out in abnormally fast time…thanks in part to our world traveling German Creative Director who spent at least six sleepless weeks in our Michigan office. In all fairness, our tech team didn’t sleep either. The end result: The prototype was a huge success, for Vectorform and for BMW.
This led us to the BMW 7-series Surface Configurator, created by Vectorform to ultimately enhance the BMW dealership purchasing experience, starting with the mother dealership—BMW Welt. And yes, many, many more sleepless nights…
So what is it?
The BMW 7-series Surface Configurator allows customers to personalize and fully experience the BMW brand through an intuitive and Natural User Interface (NUI). While customizing their automobile, customers are immersed in a sensory experience by using real paint chips, leather, trim and rim samples. Interactive designs allows a 360° view of interior and exterior images, giving customers the ability to fully explore their custom configuration. The BMW Surface Configurator allows for saving and building a virtual garage of configurations and to further the overall experience, customers can view BMW lifestyle videos, digital images, spec sheets of various automobiles and copy them to an external USB drive.
BMW 7-Series Surface Configurator
We think this was a perfect use of the Surface platform and real world objects. Being able to configure a car or anything for that matter, by use of tactile real world objects opens up a ton of possibilities. We are excited where this will lead Surface application development in the B2C market.
Big thanks to everyone who made these projects possible from the Surface guys at Microsoft, the wonderful folks at BMW and the Creative and Tech teams at VF who pulled it all together.
SKOAL!
We have a PhizzPop Winner!
Posted by Vectorform – November 13, 2008Some of the hottest design firms in New York came together in November 2008 to compete for the PhizzPop Design challenge 2008 with a focus on creating a K-12 Learning Interface. Congratulations to Team Vectorform for producing the winning application “Study Right”. A convergence and Interactive Media application using Silverlight 2 and Expression Studio to create Web and Surface experiences for Teachers, Students and Parents. Check out this VIDEO here on the PhizzPop Website.
SurfaceDJ Rocks Channel 9
Posted by Vectorform – November 7, 2008Markus and Joe rock out the Surface DJ for Adam Kinney at PDC 2008.
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