Microsoft recently launched a new Live Labs project called “Pivot” (http://www.getpivot.com/). If you don’t know what it is I suggest you take a look at their site and watch the video. It basically allows you to visually interact with large amounts of data using DeepZoom and Seadragon and WPF technologies.

Last week I downloaded it and received an invite code pretty quickly after requesting one. Today as I was playing around with the software I discovered a really cool little feature.

Pivot can work as a internet browser in addition to being a visualizer of data, while I was reading some of the developer information which was on a really long html page I grabbed the scroll bar and started to drag down. While dragging down I accidently pulled my mouse off the scroll bar and over to the left towards the “content”, at this point is when something really slick happened. The content area started to shrink in width but the height started showing more of the html page, the further to the center I moved with my mouse the skinnier it got and the more of the page I could see.

This allowed me to quickly zoom-in and out on different parts of the page, plus I could traverse up and down the page very quickly. Once I got to the place I wanted I just released the mouse button and it went back to full view on the spot I selected. Confused yet? Here are some images to help explain:

Normal View

Scroll Preview

TextureArchive.com was one of the first major projects I created with a good friend a few years ago now, we have seen decent success and our ZBrush Brushes have been a huge hit with the ZBrush Community. Interestingly enough we have more people downloading our brushes than we do our textures but both have been pretty successful.

We have recently started collecting feature ideas for the next version of TextureArchive, we have let the site get stagnate over the years and we really want to rejuvenate the site again into a thriving Digital Art community.

I decided to open up discussions with you to help us understand what kind of features you would like to see on the new site, we are open to anything but won’t guarantee anything either. We are building the site from the ground up, completely new backend, completely new frontend, everything is new. We are looking for any ideas you may have that you haven’t found on other digital art websites, what do YOU want to see and use?

Do you have a LinkedIn account?
We have created a group over here: LinkedIn – TextureArchive Group where we are also collecting ideas, we’d love to have you join up as well.

We are also on Facebook: Click here

Looking forward to your feedback!

Sometimes at night I lay awake for hours thinking about the issues of the world and how to make existing things better. So today I’m going to go a bit off-topic and talk about an idea I had in regards to learning how to speak if you are deaf.

I am not deaf and have basically no knowledge as to what tools and techniques are already in place to help aid those who cannot hear, my idea may already exist and may already be in use, I really have no idea.

The concept is really pretty simple: Every voice or sound creates a sound wave which can be easily viewed using various instruments. If a person says “Dog” it will create what I would expect to be a fairly consistent sound wave shape no matter who is actually saying the word. Every letter or general sound would work the same way, if someone says “B” it will have a pretty specific sound wave.

To me it makes sense then to have someone speak each letter of the alphabet into a machine and record each sound wave as an image or video clip. Then have a deaf person who is learning to speak, talk into the same device in real-time, while speaking the word the deaf person will be able to see what their voice or sound wave looks like compared to the sound wave example. If the deaf person repeats the word, letter or sound over and over again in various ways while each time trying to make their sound wave as similar to the example sound wave as possible then eventually they will line up or at least get very close.

Once the sound waves line up as much as possible, in theory the deaf person could then very easily speak that word, letter or sound. With practice and learning as many words and letters as possible, eventually the deaf person will be able to speak as clearly and well as someone who can hear.

If you look at really good musicians they do something very similar when tuning their instruments, their ears have been trained to hear when a string is not in tune. A musician may ask a neighbor who is in tune to play a certain note so that they can tune their own instrument to match it, this technique works really well.

So what is the difference between matching a tone by hearing it versus matching a tone by seeing it?

What are your thoughts? Does this idea already exist and is it being used today? Is my idea ridiculous or seem reasonable? Let me know your thoughts, would love to hear your perspective.

Finally a new blog design and beginning of an exciting journey!

During the past few months I have been taking any spare time I have and putting some time into designing a new blog design so that I could get rid of the basic template I was using before. This new design and implementation is the first time that I have really done a custom Wordpress customization, typically I modify existing themes to fit my needs.

I am not completely done with implementing my design quite yet, there are a few things I need to fix and few issues to resolve but they will get worked out as time allows. As someone who works primarily with .NET and rarely with PHP it was a very different experience and challenge but rewarding at the same time. Working with Wordpress this first time around felt very clumsy and awkward, I’m not sure if it’s just the way Wordpress is setup or what. How about using some sort of template system instead of having to basically recreate the UI for each type of page (Post, Search, Page, etc.) or the fact that not all opening and closing tags can always be in the same file, that’s horrible for trying to debug layout issues.

A bunch of little quirky things like that made learning Wordpress a challenge, however I’m optimistic that it will continue to get easier to work with and I have barely scratched the surface of the real power to the Wordpress architecture.

Now that I am finally happy with the way my blog looks I can really begin to dive into writing articles and providing resources that are useful to everyone in the design field, hope you will keep an eye on what there is to come.

Headline Photo: While spending a weekend up in Duluth MN and the North Shore with my wife and friends we hiked on several trails, this shot looked particularly interesting to me, I am quite happy with how it turned out.

Cheers
Zebb.