eScience @ Microsoft : Silverlight

Project Tuva: Richard Feynman is now available to all.

eScience — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:15:31 GMT

Project Tuva, an enhanced video player showcasing Richard Feynman’s “Messenger” lectures is available for all to try out. It’s the way I’d like to view talks and related information – check it out. Not only does it allow for web links, images, but it also integrates with the WorldWide Telescope control to help augment the example Feynman uses in the gravitational talk. Currently only the first lecture in the series “Law of Gravitation – an Example of Physical Law” utilizes all the annotations/links, but the do all have the transcripts, so you can search on something like “particles” and see where it is mentioned in all the different videos, and then jump directly to the location.

Microsoft Research and Bill Gates Bring Historic Physics Lectures to Web

Lecture series by celebrated physics professor Richard Feynman is now available to all.

REDMOND, Wash. — July 14, 2009 — Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, today launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science.

The historic lectures and related content can be seen at http://research.microsoft.com/tuva. The name “Tuva” was chosen because of Feynman’s lifelong fascination with the small Russian republic of Tuva, located in the heart of Asia.

Feynman was one of the most popular scientists of the 20th century, equally regarded for his scientific insights as well as his ability to convey his enthusiasm for science through his lectures and writings. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 and was also known for his quirky sense of humor and eccentric and wide-ranging interests.

“No one was more adept at making science fun and interesting than Richard Feynman,” said Gates. “More than 20 years after first seeing them, these are still some of the best science lectures I’ve heard. Feynman worked hard during his life to popularize science, so I’m sure he’d be thrilled that now anyone, anywhere in the world, can just click a button and experience his lectures.”

Curtis Wong, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, enhanced the experience of viewing the lectures by integrating the historic video with a Microsoft Silverlight-based video player that allows viewers to search the lectures for references to particular subjects, take notes that are synchronized to the video, and click on hyperlinks to related Web content, among other customized operations.

“There is a lot of public interest in building innovative educational resources online,” Wong said. “This is an opportunity to take some existing educational content and utilize software and the wealth of resources available on the Web to create a richer learning experience. And because people can annotate the lectures with their own comments and links to related resources, I expect this experience to become richer and richer over time.”

Microsoft Research has been exploring video annotation for many years and chose to publish the Feynman “Messenger” lectures with a new enhanced video player. Neither Microsoft nor the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were involved in the acquisition of the rights to the lectures.

Microsoft Research and Bill Gates Bring Historic Physics Lectures to Web: Lecture series by celebrated physics professor Richard Feynman is now available to all.

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Michael Jackson Memorial Concert Live in HD on the Web

eScience — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:14:10 GMT

Just heard that the Michael Jackson Memorial concert will be broadcast live in HD over the Web. They will be using IIS Smooth Streaming and Silverlight, the technology that delivered on-demand video for the 2008 Sumer Olympics on NBCOlympics.com.

Michael Jackson Memorial Concert | Sympatico / MSN inMusic

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Out of this World - NASA - International Space Station Photosynth collections

eScience — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:19:21 GMT

NASA released some out of the world Photosynth collections today – highlighting the International Space Station (inside and out) and the next Mars Rover. The photos by NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus really show off all the details of such a complex “flying machine” both internally and externally. Now I just need to find time to do the ISS Scavenger Hunt – I’m really interested in finding the Space dude

This robot toy action figure appeared on the Space Station. He or she stands guard to ensure that the stations robots are well cared for and used.

The Mars Rover is in JPL's robot-testing Mars Yard and you can see some real details of all the equipment it has on board.

NASA - International Space Station Photosynth collections

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

WorldWide Telescope – Busy couple of weeks – NASA and SilverLight

eScience — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:53:06 GMT

Yesterday the joint press release went out on the collaboration and Space Act Agreement we’re been working on with NASA for sometime. We’re really excited about working with NASA to process many datasets like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and make them available in WorldWide Telescope. Having these images available in the TOAST (tesselated octahedral adaptive subdivision transform) projection format will not only benefit WWT but any viewer supporting that format. The benefit of using TOAST as Jonathan Fay one mentioned “It creates a 360-degree wraparound view that’s either a planet surface or the infinite sphere of the sky, and lets you represent it using a 3D graphics accelerator, very rapidly and efficiently. So we can have an image pyramid the way Deep Zoom does, and TerraServer before it, but we don’t have to give up the poles.”

NASA and Microsoft to Make Universe of Data Available to the Public

There is a really good article out talking about some of the background behind Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay’s labor of love. WorldWide Telescope Puts Wonders of Space on a PC

The other big news is that at Mix09 we put out a alpha release of the worldwide telescope web client built using SilverLight. Now all the folks running Macs can see what all the buzz was behind Scoble’s post What made me cry: Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope from last year.

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

eclipse4SL: Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight

eScience — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:47:58 GMT

Just saw a posting that eclipse4SL - the Eclipse tools for Silverlight project is available. It is an eclipse plug-in that enables Eclipse developers to use the Eclipse IDE to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime platform.

The purpose of this project is the creation of open source tools integrated with the Eclipse development platform that enable Java developers to use the Eclipse platform to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime platform. Specifically, the project will be an Eclipse plug-in that works with the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to provide both a Silverlight development environment and greater interoperability between Silverlight and Java, to facilitate the integration of Silverlight-based applications into Java-based web sites and services. The project has been submitted to the Eclipse Foundation and released as an open Eclipse project.

Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Swearing-in Ceremony on the Web

eScience — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:45:27 GMT

It will be great to be able to watch the swearing-in ceremony from any computer on the internet. That combine with CNN/Photosynth capturing The Moment of the oath should be pretty amazing – can’t wait to see that synth…

How it Will Work

We’ll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN’s professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN. And you thought the Jessica Yellin hologram was cool! The synth will also be available for everyone to see on CNN.com.

If you have a…

Camera Phone. Take one photo of the moment when the President Elect raises his hand to take the Oath, and email it as soon as you can to cnnmoment@live.com. Don’t worry if he’s too small to see clearly in your photo. As long as you get the Capitol building in your shot it will synth in and help reconstruct the environment.

Digital Camera. Take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom) of the President Elect while he is being sworn in. As soon as you can get to an Internet connection, email them to us at cnnmoment@live.com. Make sure your email message is less than 10MB in size. Break it into a couple of messages if your three photos combine to more than 10MB.

Watch the Swearing-in Ceremony on the Web

Don’t miss it when Barack Obama takes the Oath of Office next Tuesday, January 20th. As part of our commitment to making this the most open inauguration in history, we’ll be streaming the swearing-in ceremony on our site using Microsoft’s Silverlight.

You can view high quality Silverlight streams, in full screen, and enjoy related inaugural video content.

As long as you have an Internet connection, you’ll be able to watch the ceremony as if you were there. Visit www.pic2009.org on Tuesday, January 20th to watch the swearing-in live.

The swearing-in ceremony begins at 11:30 a.m. ET on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Take a look at the rest of the scheduled events for Inaugural Weekend.

Watch the Swearing-in Ceremony on the Web | The Inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Photosynth in Silverlight

eScience — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:10:27 GMT

Very neat to see a experimental Silverlight viewer for Photosynth.

Here’s one synth I did while at SC08 of the MS Booth

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

DeepEarth - VE and Silverlight Deep Zoom

eScience — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:09:17 GMT

Just ran across he DeepEarth OpenSource community project on CodePlex - bringing SilverLight 2 Deep Zoom to Virtual Earth - it pans and zooms really smooth. Test it out or check out the video

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

NY Times Reader Beta for the Mac OS Now Available

eScience — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:33:39 GMT

Just saw this post that the NY Times Reader for the Mac is available - I'm interested in seeing how the Silverlight version works. I've been using the WPF version for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and really like the ease of reading articles. I'd like to see some research journals and magazines adopt this model as well.

NY Times Reader Beta for the Mac OS Now Available

If anyone out there has not had an opportunity to use the NY Times Reader to read the NY Times, you're missing out on a great experience! The Times Reader is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that let's you read the paper on or offline in a rich format. It's been available for over a year now, but you do have to pay a subscription fee to use it. <...>

The NY Times has now released a beta edition of the Times Reader for the Mac. What's interesting about this version is that it is built using Silverlight in combination with Cocoa (the native Mac programming language), and the Safari WebKit. The application runs as a stand alone desktop application on the Mac and is very similar to the WPF PC version. Tim Heuer posted about it on his blog. The NY Times folks have shared some technical details over on their blog.

[Thanks JrzyShr Dev Guy]

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Create Your Own E-Learning

eScience — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:36:57 GMT

Ran across the release of the Learning Content Development System (LCDS). Would seem to be a good way to package up some scientific demos/simulations and get it out in short course forms...

What is the LCDS?

The Learning Content Development System (LCDS) is a tool that enables you to create high quality, interactive, online courses. Virtually anyone can publish e-learning courses by completing the easy-to-use LCDS forms that seamlessly generate highly customized content, interactivities, quizzes, games, and assessments—as well as Silverlight-based animations, demos, and other multimedia. Register to download the free LCDS release, then start creating your own e-learning courses today!

Register to download the free LCDS tool

What does the LCDS offer?

With the LCDS, you can:

Develop and deliver content quickly, while it is timely and relevant.

Distribute your content via the Web or in a learning management system.

Deliver Web content that conforms to Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) 1.2, and which can be hosted in a learning management system.

Upload or attach your existing content. (LCDS supports multiple file formats.)

Choose from a wide variety of forms for authoring rich e-learning content.

Develop your course structure and easily rearrange it at any time.

Create Your Own E-Learning

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Fluxnet move to Silverlight v2.0 Beta 1

eScience — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:25:47 GMT

Savas has been coding again :-) - he's updated the FLUXNET Data set visualization to Silverlight v2.

Fluxnet move to Silverlight v2.0 Beta 1

It's been a while since I touched the Fluxnet code. Given that the original release was built on Silverlight v1.1, I put some time today in re-implementing it in Silverlight v2.0 Beta 1.

Enjoy.

Fluxnet move to Silverlight v2.0 Beta 1

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Kit3D - a 3D graphics engine for Microsoft Silverlight

eScience — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:01:45 GMT

I was pointed to this on CodePlex - interesting to think how it could be used to enable Science Apps to display their data in 3D. Check out the samples at http://www.markdawson.org/Kit3D

Kit3D - a 3D graphics engine for Microsoft Silverlight - Home

Kit3D is a 3D graphics engine for Microsoft Silverlight. There is a JavaScript version that runs on the 1.0 bits of Silvelright, however moving forward the engine will be maintained in C#. The library has been refactored to match the System.Windows.Media.Media3D namespace so that it closely matches development for WPF3D syntax (saves me creating documentation :-) )
For some examples of the library in action, see http://www.markdawson.org/Kit3D

Kit3D - a 3D graphics engine for Microsoft Silverlight - Home

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Silverlight-based cycle stealing

eScience — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:12:20 GMT

Savas and I had talked about this idea of using Silverlight-based cycle stealing and wondered how well it would work. It's good to see this article on CodeProject about Legion: Build your own virtual super computer with Silverlight by Daniel Vaughan.

Legion is a Grid Computing framework that uses the Silverlight CLR to execute user definable tasks. Legion uses an ASP.NET application and web services to download tasks, upload result data, and provide grid-wide thread-safe operations for web clients or agents. Multiple tasks can be hosted at once, with Legion managing the delegation of tasks to agents. Client performance metrics, such as bandwidth and processor speed, may be used to tailor jobs for clients. Legion provides a management service and WPF application that is used to monitor the Legion grid.
I have deployed Legion to a demonstration server here so you can see it in action.

I wonder if Daniel is aware of the previous Legion grid system by Andrew Grimshaw that turned into Avaki (now part of Sybase)

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

PopFly open to Public Beta

eScience — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:12:04 GMT

It's great to see that PopFly is now open to a larger audience via it's public beta.

I especially like the PopFly mashup Deb Agarwal (Berkeley Water Center) did with the AmeriFlux datasets they are working with - a good example of how you can visualize scientific data.

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)