Galactic Alliance HD via Attack of the Show!
Posted by Administrator – July 15, 2011
G4′s Attack of the Show! ambushed our friends and neighbors at the Microsoft campus, capturing a whirlwind of video highlights and a cameo of Vectorform’s Galactic Alliance HD. The four-player tower defense game made a big splash at CES this year, where it could be experienced on the new Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface. Check out the demo from Director of Research Steven Bathiche, at 3:43.
Read more
Vectorform-designed BI site launches on Microsoft.com
Posted by Administrator – May 5, 2011
Design, development, Microsoft, SharePoint, Salient6, FNX Studios, a whole lot of credits—and a whole lotta Business Intelligence!
Read more
We’re reading about Kinect improving literacy in South Africa
Posted by Administrator – March 31, 2011Not us, but pretty amazing. TechNet reports on use of Kinect to support learning in Lakeside Park Primary in Vryheid, KwaZulu-Natal. Kinect technology has certainly been a game-changer–for Microsoft, for digital experience folk like us, and now for young learners in a small school in South Africa.
Virtual Colonoscopy Viewer at TechFest, experts weigh in
Posted by Administrator – March 17, 2011Colon cancer is the third leading cause of cancer related deaths, but the death rate is impacted by the ability to quickly and efficiently screen for polyps before they can develop. The Virtual Colonoscopy (VC) Viewer is a revolutionary collaboration between Microsoft, Intel, Vectorform and Massachusetts General Hospital, winning top honors at RSNA 2010.
Vectorform’s multi-touch user interface allows physicians to view and manipulate a 3D rendering of a patient’s colon. Using software to translate a series of CT scans into a 3D representation, the VC Viewer provides physicians with life-like imagery and seamless navigation using natural gestures including pan, zoom, pinch, traverse and rotate. This Natural User Interface (NUI) solution was highlighted at TechFest 2011, which brings Microsoft researchers and Microsoft product teams together in Redmond, WA for an event where attendees see the innovative technologies emerging from Microsoft’s research efforts.
Read more
Business 2 Community on Foursquare Playground, Vectorform’s busy month
Posted by Administrator – March 17, 2011“SXSW has been an exciting — albeit busy — time for global design and technology firm Vectorform. Not only did they take home the SXSW Award in Technical Achievement on Tuesday night for their involvement with the AP Timeline Reader, but they’ve also teamed up with some major brand names (think Foursquare, Microsoft, and Fiat’s brand agency, Impatto) to provide users a cutting edge experience.” Renee DeCoskey hits the nail on the head, and goes in-depth on our HTML5 experience, Foursquare Playground, over at Business 2 Community.
Check it out, and while there, we also recommend B2C’s coverage of Foursquare’s growth from six to seven million users, all between January and February of this year. With Foursquare Playground officially open for business, it will be interesting to see what March and April bring.
As for our work with Foursquare, Microsoft and Fiat/Impatto, it is a busy and exciting time. Our next SXSW spotlight hits on a Fiat brand experience, and the continued efforts of the Vectorform squad in Austin, Texas, so stay tuned here.
We’re up! AP Timeline Reader gets SXSW Interactive Award nod
Posted by Administrator – March 10, 2011Vectorform created The AP Timeline Reader in collaboration with The Associated Press and Microsoft. Now the HTML5 site is up for a Technical Achievement Award at South by Southwest, which means our project is one of five recognized as “…re-inventing and re-defining the technical parameters of our online experience.”
How do we go about re-inventing and redefining the technical parameters of online experience? HTML5, CSS3, and pure UX magic. Hear master magician Dominic Espinosa talking about the AP Timeline Reader below, or wander over to Renee DeCoskey’s detailed overview at Business 2 Community. News reading reinvented, and it’s got pictures!
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
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
Vectorform shows off at Microsoft’s “Many Screens and a Cloud” event
Posted by Lindsay Ruthven – August 16, 2010Working with the Microsoft Research Team and Massachusetts General Hospital, Vectorform’s Justin Lankes and Patrick Samona demonstrated the Virtual Colonoscopy Viewer at a recent event in Boston, MA. Virtual Colonoscopy makes it possible to navigate through 3D images of the colon using a multi-touch platform. The goal behind this application is to reduce the time of a typical colonoscopy exam to only 5 minutes. Currently, the procedure takes 40-60 minutes. Virtual Colonoscopy requires a series of clear, high-resolution images to be taken from a CT scanner. Once the pictures are taken, the part of the exam that can be considered by patients to be “invasive” is done! The high-res images are then fed into the application, giving the doctor the opportunity to explore and navigate through the colon, searching for polyps. A standard colonoscopy procedure entails a doctor’s examination of the colon in real time using a fiber optic camera attached to a flexible tube; the tube then gets passed through the rectum. As you can imagine, this can be a long and uncomfortable experience. We hope Virtual Colonoscopy will encourage more people to opt for colon cancer screening, giving us an opportunity to save lives.
Would you like to learn more? Check out Microsoft’s Curt Devlin’s blog post about the application and the demonstration in Boston.
Virtual Colonoscopy will also be demonstrated at the RSNA Conference in November, stay tuned for more updates!
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.
Read more