Chewing the fat with Paulfo and Jamie yesterday we were thinking about an After Hours sort of thing for TechDays.

Paul did some AR stuff just before Christmas (video below) and then we somehow ended up on the subject of The Adventure Game.

Amazing.

Anyway, I’m trying to convince Paul to turn the AR thing he’s got into a copy of the Vortex…

The Wikipedia entry on The Adventure Game also contains the immortal line:

Notable contestants included Keith Chegwin, Sue Cook, astronomer Heather Couper, John Craven, Paul Darrow, Noel Edmonds,Sarah Greene, Bonnie Langford and Richard Stilgoe.

Ah – memories of happy times…

It’d be crazy for me not to spread the love for this awesome video from TED in which Blaise Aguera y Arcas (of Seadragon fame) demonstrates augmented reality integration inside Bing Maps.

I demo’d some of the Photosynth and Bing Maps integration at an internal shindig just a few months ago which I thought was awesome. Looks decidedly old already in the face of this. Fantastic pace of innovation from Bing – which I’m coming to expect.

Other videos I’d recommend (I’m still working my way through) would be Bill Gate’s Innovate to Zero, and Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish: Teach every child about food.

With particular regard to Jamie’s session:

• It pleases me that Evan (my daughter – 2) does recognise potatoes, tomatoes and lemons already.
• Jamie has – in one 18 minute slot – validated my “drunken bloke on a ship in a force 9 gale” style of swaying about whilst giving a presentation. They try and change me, but I say no…

Loved this find on 37Signals of a memo from Richard Williams - animation director on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” – to his team.

Whilst Mix has been going on, Surface was also officially launched in the UK. Dr Dave was there to help things along. There’s a lot of commentary on the intertubes about the launch:

Times Online, Mirror Online, Channel4.com, Silicon.com, CIO, TechDigest, Reuters, TechRadar, Pocket-lint, Shiny Shiny, Computer Weekly, IT Pro, Electric Pig

Anyway, you know it, I know it, multi-touch is going to (continue to) be huge. If you want to look at how development of Surface looks, then have a look at this video with contributions from the development team – there’s some interesting insight into the mindshift necessary, and the similarities and differences to WPF development. You get to see a little of the joy that is “messing around in the MTC lab too” Oh, and it’s a cool application.

I’m in the lab at the moment working on some Mesh-related concepts (cool!) but found the time to head down to ReMix last week.

It was great to see and speak to a lot of you over the event. Well, I say see and speak, but clearly after around 9pm I wasn’t able to do either very easily as the generous helpings of hospitality kicked in.

Key for me was Simon Fell and Steve White from ITV demonstrating their Silverlight 2 football wall service – you can see that here. As usual there’s always a breath-holding moment before any demo that relies on the internet for access but it went very smoothly and in fact the quality of video was pretty astounding. I’ve not seen Rafa Benitez look so good for some time.

Steve described the value that Silverlight brought to an existing Microsoft development team as a few things: reuse of existing skills in the UI, superior tooling in VS2008 and practices from Team Foundation Server.

It is important to consider these advantages – it’s not all about some specific runtime capability when considering adoption inside a development team.

Other stuff that caught my eye included a great keynote from Bill Buxton, setting the standard high and some excellent dev-focussed sessions from Scottgu (Silverlight), our own Mike Taulty (Silverlight and Services), Johannes Kebeck (Virtual Earth) and Mike Flasko (ADO.NET Data Services).

The aformentioned Microsoft Interactive Canvas also went down very well.

But what did you think? Do we get the pace, tone and content of the conversation right? I’m really interested to hear your thoughts.

Given I work in the media space, I should probably be among the first to blog about such things, but of course I never am. This is some of the big news for IBC.

This is a pretty big deal though and represents choice for anyone utilising Silverlight, and its media ecosystem.

My friend Tim Heuer – whose blog just goes from strength to strength IMHO – has the deets.

Linerider has been moved to Silverlight. Very cool, and a nice integration with Messenger and the Contacts API. It’s a winner, casual gaming fans!

Great DeepZoom example – a Barack Obama collage made from 12,000 thumbnails from his supporters. I wonder if they could rustle up enough photos to do one of Gordon Brown? (Note: cheap jibe, rather than some description of my political bias.)

If you haven’t already seen the Kit3D stuff before then take a look at this demo site…

I often talk about the starting points for thinking about the value of RIAs as being:

• Data visualisation: graphs, charts and other data
• Use of metaphors that makes the experience more joyful and useful

On the second point then, it’s great to see the updated support for control skinning in the latest Beta drop. Tim Heuer helps us out here and here.