Karsten Januszewski - Home video of Avalon presentation at Flash Forward conference | TheChannel9Team

Karsten Januszewski, technical evangelist, presented recently at the Macromedia Flashforward conference.

"What is a Microsoft technical evangelist doing at a design conference?"

Well, he showed off a ton of demos of Avalon that we thought you'd like to see.

The whole talk is interesting for those of you interested in Avalon, but the demos are particularly good. The demos get better toward the end, so if you only have a few minutes to watch, go to the last few demos.

13:11 XAML file presentation app.
21:50 3D composition app
24:00 skinning your app
25:50 Avalon notepad
27:30 Media Mania (you've seen this app on Channel 9 before, but here you get to see more)
32:50 Electric Rain's ZAM 3D (amazing 3D to Avalon app)
44:00 Video in Avalon (a preview of a future version of Avalon)
47:30 Video on a 3D sphere
48:20 video on multiple 3D spheres
49:30 A "Halo strip" (multiple photos on 3D surfaces)

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kostik_y2k Cats, Cats, Cats!

Apr 27, 2005 at 1:40 AM

It's just amazing....... !
Kryptos Backup People!

Apr 27, 2005 at 2:06 AM

The more I see of Avalon the more excited I get, sure we will end up with some bad UI's, but this stuff rocks. I'm go to play with Avalon........
RbmxXx

Apr 27, 2005 at 2:20 AM

Where can i download this AVALON Damo??

It's so cool!!
Arran

Apr 27, 2005 at 2:56 AM

Yeah the Avalon stuff does look really good, an i will be having a look at it as soon as they release a CTP for VS Beta2.

I keep seeing MS say that Longhorn Beta1 is this summer and Beta2 the fall. Is it just me or do they seem close together?

When you think about most of the beta programs for example VS2005. Beta 1 Summer/Fall 2004 then Beta2 Spring 2005 and as big a project that VS2005 is i am sure Longhorn is many times bigger.

I get the feeling that Beta2 will slip to spring 2006.
MisterDonut The Disco Godfather

Apr 27, 2005 at 4:58 AM

Preemptive Obnoxiousness

We already have this in Linux..

Microsoft copied this from Steve Jobs' G5.

It's not open source, so it's awful.

It won't run on anything by Windows, so it's bad.

Avalon doesn't help command-line utilities, so it's worthless..

Did I forget anything?

(Seriously, I can't wait to see this on the train ride home.)
Dr. Shim Inaniloquent monomathical people inlapidate me.

Apr 27, 2005 at 8:24 AM

A Flash conference and not one word about Flash. Sinners.

I do wonder how I could integrate Flash with all this neat 3D stuff. Could I overlay a Flash presentation over a 3D surface, like I can with video?

Woot!
bonk Ich bin der Wurstfachverkäuferin !

Apr 27, 2005 at 8:36 AM

System.Threading.Increment( MisterDonut );
Stebet Internet spaceships is serious business3;

Apr 27, 2005 at 9:40 AM

Is there a possibility that some (or all) of these demos could be shipped with the next CTP?
NateDunlap

Apr 27, 2005 at 11:26 AM

I will definitely try to post samples of how we accomplished these things in the next CTP. http://www.designerslove.net
BrandonFurtwangler

Apr 27, 2005 at 2:25 PM

Hey Nathan, your blog rocks! Who was the other guy that mentioned having a blog?
NateDunlap

Apr 27, 2005 at 4:20 PM

I think you are referring to Karsten

His blog is at: http://blogs.msdn.com/karstenj/

Let me know if you were thinking of someone else?
NateDunlap

Apr 27, 2005 at 4:39 PM

Actually the laptop does have a pretty decent card. Its a Radeon 9800 mobility. Which is fast becoming an old card... I just saw a laptop for sale that has 256M cards on it... drool.

Anyway when I switched the app to render 40 rows we are showing about 1200 images... That are mapped to about 1200 3D mesh planes (roughly 2400 polygons... excuse my math i'm a designer

I think the real tax was in the fact that we were mapping so many images not because of the polygon count. (Ive used models from Zam3D that had much higher polygon count)

Anyway the scenario hasnt really been optimized for showing that many images. The framerate stays pretty high with about 10 rows, But it was cool engough looking when you can see down a tube of 1200 images (even if the framerate was compromised).

We have been playing around with implementing a similar effect using VisualBrush on a single 3D mesh and have found that we can accomplish this at a much higher frame rate, but we lack some of the 3D interactivity that we created.
BootGuy

Apr 27, 2005 at 7:07 PM

XAML is a code name that may not stick?!? Come on, Microsoft isn't going to change the name of XAML. I guarantee it!
BootGuy

Apr 27, 2005 at 7:50 PM

Adobe's probably not going to be too happy about their purchase of Macromedia 2 years from now, as Flash dies out and Microsoft's technology rules the world!
Sk4rlath The lesser of two Sampys (in age only).

Apr 27, 2005 at 8:57 PM

I must know. Was Halo a listbox control?
BruceLee

Apr 27, 2005 at 9:01 PM

The demos are so cool and the speaker is so funny! Love it.
dantheman82

Apr 27, 2005 at 9:06 PM

Why not? I could see how it could be made using the composition/transformation outlined in the video. I am SO happy I had to sweat through some of the tough stuff in a Comp. Graphics class in OpenGL. I'd definitely say pick up a primer on OpenGL before you delve in, and this will boggle your mind. Just a surface-level view of OpenGL/Directx will show the 3D possibilities available. As a side-effect, I think DirectX may become a lot less useful than it used to be (more specialized/advanced).

I thought the XAM3D is missing the point of Avalon. Any user, not a graphic artist, can now make amazing 3D graphics. Their tool doesn't make this obvious AT ALL! Let's just say for starters that Print-Screen may be a whole ton more cool than it used to be .

Ideas are popping into my mind like scores of images on a massive 3D cone.
dantheman82

Apr 27, 2005 at 9:09 PM

Arran wrote:

I keep seeing MS say that Longhorn Beta1 is this summer and Beta2 the fall. Is it just me or do they seem close together?

I get the feeling that Beta2 will slip to spring 2006.

I've already heard that Longhorn Beta2 is planned for Holiday 2006, which is presumably right around the New Year (preferably before Valentines' Day).
Dr. Shim Inaniloquent monomathical people inlapidate me.

Apr 28, 2005 at 1:56 AM

I downloaded the Zam 3D beta trial, and opened a 3D truck with some simple animation. I then exported it as a XAML file. The resulting XML heirarchy was huge. Eight megabytes o' text.

Alright, maybe not that huge, but still. That's a lot of plain-text. I'm thinking that for a somewhat complex 3D XAML model or presentation is going to be rather large -- unlike Flash, which is a binary format. Can we utilize XOP for Avalon?

My point is, how Web-friendly is Avalon? Or should a Avalon UI designer keep the 3D to a minimum for online presentations?
moofish Living in Scotland, UK

Apr 28, 2005 at 4:17 AM

It was some wait but the pictures at the end were arranged like a wormhole (like DS9), I wanted him to fly through it. Imagine Amazon working like that and the user wearing a headset, he could (in 3D) fly through all the albums that might interest him and immerse himself in the experience.

Great!

P.S. Well done ZAM 3D
MisterDonut The Disco Godfather

Apr 28, 2005 at 6:15 AM

Follow up to earlier obnoxiousness:

I really liked the demo. I'd love to have some sample code to play around with.. But its ashame my CTO for WinFX doesn't work.. (Can't seem to find the right version of the framework, despite it being there.. I heard others had this problem).
dantheman82

Apr 28, 2005 at 8:39 PM

Personally had a problem running VS 2005 Beta 2 (GUI/ASP.NET visual editor were broken). So, I may have to reinstall the 2GB file. Also interested in Avalon + Beta 2. GRRR
Frank W ^_^

Apr 29, 2005 at 3:01 AM

Well, that's pretty interesting. I heard about Longhorn last year, but only had a little try on it. My problem is that I'm not a design guy, so I can't make nice art for the Avalon powered app.
blazo

Apr 30, 2005 at 8:13 PM

Two questions.

What are the plans for color fidelity?

Will there be tools available to morph the polyhedronal building block shapes on the fly?
Pablo Fernicola

May 04, 2005 at 8:40 PM

We also have a container and compression in Avalon. I would expect that in the future, the export from tools will expose this in addition to the plain XAML file.

If you are just moving it to another tool or want to do some XML processing, a flat file may be better. If you want to store or send the information to someone else, using the container and compression is the best option.

XAML files with 3D data compress really well.

-Pablo