Aspen Mountain in WPF
More news from the Designer Utopia Event, Beau Ambur from Metaliq showed off their Aspen snowboarding WPF application to the technical crowd. Again he highlighted the great way that the Expression tools integrate seamlessly with Visual Studio, finally uniting Designers and Developers on one common project format.
The app itself is very rich, which prompted questions from the crowd on the recommended specification for hardware and what kind of "beast" you needed under the bonnet (so to speak). Beau said that on older machines, say a couple of years old they did some testing and with full 3D complex poly and detailed textures the performance and responsiveness to user interaction wasn't great - but when they created slightly lower quality textures for lower spec machines the performance was much better.
They pointed people to a recent WPF performance paper (Read the full document here) which answers a lot of questions around performance with WPF - definitely worth a read.
The application itself had a 2 weeks development lifecycle which impressed me (I remembered back to my development days :-)) He highlighted again the ease of workflow from using Expression and Visual Studio.
From his presentation photos it sounded like they had a real fun time creating this application and got in a lot of skiing and snowboarding!!!
They modelled the whole mouintain in 3D from a satellite image that they extrapolated to create a 3D model and then convert it into XAML using Electric Rain's software Zam 3D.
They used GPS satellites and wrist watches (watch out James Bond) to capture location data of snowboarders as they travelled down the mountain on all the ski runs. The GPS data was used to find ski runs on the mountain and figure out angle and direction of theboarder. In a tabular format this kind of data is difficult to understand but put into a 3D model the data comes into life and becomes useful information". Check out the snowboarder image on the left which show the different stats throughout his journey down the mountain.
The timeline in Blend is created programatically at runtime using data captured in the 3D map which is pretty mind blowing when you think about it.
He also showed an RSS feed consumed in Expression Blend which allowed him to drop real content into his design and consume it. In the instance of this design it was weather info used to display weather and state of day in the application.
Technorati tags: Metaliq, WPF, Expression Blend