Videos from The Yeast Cell Cycle

These are videos that are part of an educational applet that we created for Kumar Lab at the University of Michigan's Life Sciences Institute as a continuation to his Organelle DB and Organelle View. The applet also contains a rotatable yeast cell cycle animation. It was a lot of fun and a lot of work. We especially enjoyed all the research that went into it. We had a difficult time finding dimensional information about yeast cell development. What we cobbled together is probably a pretty unique set of models.

Visit the BETA version of the applet here. We will be doing user testing on the applet in the next few months, and then we will make changes based on the results.

Blogged with Flock

Virtual Pop-up Exhibits Guide

It has been a busy day for N Formation Design. This morning, I (impromptu) went to a conference in Philadelphia on blogging called BlogPhiladelphia. I got to meet a few people and it made me super excited about blogging, but I couldn't stay long.

Things are really rolling along on with our projects. One project actually went live today, and I've been dying to write about it.
Now I can.


The project in question is the Pop-up Guide to Exhibits at the Please Touch Museum. It is a 3D, rotatable model of a pop-up book that allows you to zoom-in on certain exhibits. The coolest part is the animation that Jamie (Lead Developer here at N Formation) did for the opening and closing of the book.

Well, we are very excited and hope that this convinces other museums that we really do have something unique to offer.

PhotoSynth

Imagine moving through a scene composed of photographs. And anyone's vacation photos on flickr can be part of the mix. That's precisely what PhotoSynth aims to do. It is a product by Microsoft Live Labs that is still under development.

This is the hottest new application from Microsoft. It does very similar things as the new Google Maps Street View and looks suspiciously like the images in Minority Report. Whatever the precident, it will surely change the landscape of lifelogging as well as augmented reality and virtual worlds. The conceivable applications of this make me go cross-eyed.

A really interesting lecture by one of the team development members is Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who gave a wonderful lecture about PhotoSynth at TED about a month ago. He also introduces some other technologies by SeaDragon, which was recently acquired by Microsoft. These also make me go cross-eyed, even more than does YouTube on my cellphone.