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On July 2nd last year Tanagram turned 18 years old. It was a time to reflect and celebrate our “childhood” and look to a future of unlimited possibilities.
One of our many ruminations were on the topic of our brand and our legacy as an interactive design firm. While we’ve been recognized as the first at many great things, we couldn’t help but wonder how we remained relatively invisible in the marketplace today. As a result of our pondering we have realized that the presentation of our brand, as intentional as it is, is too complex. We are too complex. Don’t worry, we’re not going to become less complex, we’re not even sure we could do that if we tried. Instead we are spending some time to help all of you understand what makes Tanagram unique in the interactive development space and there is no better way to get started than to shout it out. So here goes:
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Tanagram is unique in that we design and build software for the digital frontier. Thirty percent of our project portfolio is made up of government funded “advanced” research. We do this specifically so that we can apply our learning to our commercial client projects and our ability to make ideas real to our government projects. We focus on three specific areas:
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Here are links that might better illustrate Tanagram’s niche in the interactive design marketplace:
Complex Application:
Innovative Web:
Mobile / Augmented Reality:
In addition we’ve really turned on the PR machine. Above you’ve seen links from the New York Times, Gizmodo, and ABC featuring our work. Here are a couple of other great stories that you might not have seen:
If we haven’t lost you yet, here’s a Google Blog Search with the infinite number of posts about us. YAY VANITY SEARCH! 
If you were following us on twitter last week you already know this but SkyBeautiful was christened and launched last Wednesday. It was well received by Microsoft and the horde-o-press folks Microsoft had gathered to announce “The Beauty of The Web” and the new Internet Explorer 9.
So what’s all the hub-bub about? I mean, “haven’t we been able to do this in Flash for years?” Well, not exactly. SkyBeautiful is very special in a number of ways. First, it represents data collected from numerous sources including NASA, Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope, and the European Space Agency (ESA) in a way never before experienced.
From the SkyBeautiful About page:
Using the fantastic Hipparcos “New Reduction” data provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) we have created a three-dimensional model of approximately 120,000 of the stars nearest to our sun. That’s right, we are rendering tens-of-thousands of “star-points” on your screen, in real-time (not right now!), every time you pan the sky with your greasy mouse-fingers. It’s a minor miracle given to you by Microsoft and their compiler-builder rocket-scientists. In the split second before you think about thinking, Internet Explorer 9 converts our ga-jillions of lines of JavaScript and HTML code into a binary application that runs on the very very veeeh-hairy fastest parts of your computer. Neat huh? Thanks Bill!
We’ve also incorporated (because it’s a 3D model) an Anaglyphic View (including directions to make or buy glasses) of our star model. If you click the glasses on the bottom of the screen, you will be taken to a version of the site that is rendering twice the number of stars (one for each eye!) in a spatial-ized view. I should note, that while the star relationships are proportionally correct, we cheated and reduced light-years to pixels. We also are not rendering any star with a magnitude greater than 9 because your monitor likely can’t handle it and you won’t miss them.
We were taken by surprise when Toshiba and Sony demo-ed SkyBeautiful on their latest touch-enabled computers and were very pleased at how well it behaved in “touch-mode.” While we design all of our current projects to meet “touch transitional” specifications, it was a real pleasure to see our Natural User Interface work in action.
The real difference between SkyBeautiful and any other Flash or Silverlight site is that it is naked. If you want to learn how we did something, right-click and save-as and the code (including our JSON) is yours to explore. Like I posted earlier, Microsoft created IE9 to send a message to us that they are no longer trying to dominate the internet but instead are recognizing that they are part of a bigger system. SkyBeautiful, represents that same belief in many ways. The first is, and most obvious, is the representation of mankind within our understanding of the universe. The second is that it is entirely open-source. We “hand-rolled” our own 3D engine that renders in the Canvas Element (2D) and if you want to do something similar, you can copy our code and modify it under the Ms-PL Open Source license. You can also download our data, a collection of over 93,000 stars with distance measurements (see disclaimer on accuracy!) and build your own modeling system. The Open Source movement, and IE9 both acknowledge participation in larger systems and we approve. It’s amazing to see what we did with publicly available data, and we are super excited to see what others do with our work. Below you’ll find a video demonstrating the 3D model using the same technology we use for our Augmented Reality research. I’ve also attached several other screen shots for easy perusing.
Please let us know what you think. Enjoy the site, and know as soon as there is a ratified 3D standard, that SkyBeautiful will evolve so you can see our constellations from, say, Vega. We also hope to give you the ability to create your own constellations and share them with friends. Be warned, you’ll need to write a “legend” to go with it and we’ll likely be blocking “huge penises in the sky.” This is after-all a family friendly location.
More Screenshots:
Menlo Park is a mystical place. A place of unicorns and giants. Behind Tim (pictured above) is a tree it would take 4 people to wrap their arms around and it is sitting in someone’s front yard. Tim and I were consistently amazed by the sights, sounds, smells (Jasmine everywhere) that permeate this land of imagination. It’s no wonder so many amazing things are born here.
Some of the folks over in the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at The University of Tokyo have prototyped a Minority Report-like touchless gestural mobile interface that, in addition to the ubiquitous air typing, also allows the user to interact with with the interface in 3D.
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Seriously, until if we had a cat, it’d be nervous right now. It would need to learn Kung Fu pronto!
Because robots, like em or not, are your future. They do amazingly boring tasks perfectly, indefinitely, so you don’t have to. We think automation is exciting and mechanized automation plays a big role in that future. We also have project concepts that will rely heavily on our durable new friends. We’ll share more on that when we can.
For now know that this particular robot is solving a number of real-world supply chain issues including handling a dynamic range of pallet objects and addressing potential impending recall issues by simplifying the warehousing architecture. Simple and beautiful.
These Doc-Ock-like robotic tentacles by German tech firm Festo are given the fully cheesy industrial film treatment, but there is tons of cool here as well. For starters, the tentacles are covered in touch sensors (or something similar) and can be manually guided. The project is a continuation of Festo’s biology-inspired robots like the fun
More:
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Welcome to the spill. The overflow buffer for the passion we have for interaction.
Spill is the blog from Tanagram, Inc. a technology innovation and design company based in Chicago, Illinois.
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