I’m a big fan of writeable bitmaps.
When drawing more then 1000 items on screen writeable bitmaps performs a zillion times better then individual objects.
Based on WriteableBitmap Class MSDN sample it’s peanuts creating a fullscreen drawing application.
After modifying DirectionalBlur shader from the WPFFX I got the this little drawing app.
The above demo was done on a MSI windtop touchscreen (dual core 1.5Ghz Atom CPU)
Download the Application
Use M to (de)activate the mouse.
Use F to toggle fullscreen.
Use ESC to exit the application.
After a little delay due some supplier problems the final prototype screen is up and running !
The results are great:
Screen looks superb
The application response is really fast
Touch foil gives good response through our 10 mm plexi cover.
Low hardware requirements.
Our project goal was to create a fun application which could elaborate the screen’s full potential.
The puzzle created by Boulevart makes good use of the touch technology. It would be much slower to operate with a traditional mouse.
Hardware Case design by Joris Vanbriel from Holocube.
Joris and Jan Vanbriel did a great job solving all the hardware issues.
Current prototype uses a 46” plasma with a built-in Mac Mini. Final project will use a Mini-Itx with IDE flash memory to save space and provide a faster startup.
Software The application is built on WPF technology which suits perfectly for the job.
WPF does great on spreading the appliction load onto multiple CPU cores and can use GPU hardware acceleration.
Playing these 1360 * 720 fullscreen videos results in 30% CPU load on a 1.7 Ghz dual core setup.
Realtime video slicing using WPF’s Visualbrush.
For those of you who aren’t member of the Belgian Silverlight User Group there’s a upcoming workshop on September 10th 2009.
In this workshop, we will build a small Silverlight 3.0 application showing some of the new concepts like out of browser, animation easing, deeplinking, pixel effects, importing Photoshop files and perspective 3D. Some experience with Silverlight 2.0 is required for this workshop.
The workshop is organized with the cooperation of Boulevart
Be quick because there only a few places left.
Register at http://www.besug.be.
Inspired by old school MS DOS demos and this Flash Alchemy experiment.
Found out that someone already ported some code from the Alchemy experiment to C#.
So after some tweaking and some help of my colleague Frederik it’s up and running in Silverlight 3 beta.
I’m using two threads to speed up the plasma calculation when moving the dots, since everybody has a duo,triple,quad,octa … core CPU these days,
One thread does even lines and the other odd lines (interlacing).
Last Thursday we where lucky to attend the first BESUG launch event.
If I say user group meeting you probably think of 20 geeks eating pizza in a dusty basement.
Except from the geeks none of the above was true, we where located at the nice IBBT Gent offices.
There was great catering sponsered by Microsoft and PlugMedia !
We even got a signed XBOX360 t-shirt by our Belgium .NET hero Giiiiil Cleeren wich was dedicated to our collegue Frederik who missed the event due to illness.
