If I gave you my demo DVD at GDC then you've seen the video below. I've spent the past couple of weeks editing down a few minutes of video (NVidia drivers made a 2 minute project a 2 week one). It shows a much closer look of the UI and functionality in The North Face In-Store Explorer Kiosk. I received some feedback after posting the last video and it seems like the one thing I forgot to include was an example of the 3D product rotation (skip to time 1:16 on the video timeline below). This feature is implemented with an image montage control and is not implemented with a 3D mesh and textures, but it makes for a very believable product rotation (thanks to Darren).
We never claimed that the 3D product rotation was a textured mesh rendered in realtime but we did discuss it. I think it would be a fun project to create a pipeline for generating these products in 3D and placing them in a world like Second Life or even as an additional feature of a game, like being able to buy gear in a snowboarding game. Maybe down the road we'll see realtime 3D product applications like this in the mainstream, like the Timberland Boot Configurator created by Fluid, Inc and good friend Paul Spitzer.
It's a beauty that XAML is cross-platform and has runtimes for the web, media center, XBox, mobile, and desktop. It wouldn't be too difficult to take the same XAML UI created for the original kiosk application and make it work as a Media Center app.
I'm a bit depressed that we don't see 3D in WPFe. Maybe down the road but I don't think we'll see hardware accelerated, cross-platform, and markup driven apps that are widely used, for quite some time. But hey, I guess if you want to create a UI that falls under the Animal Planet’s “Most Extreme” these days, you just have to step out into the world and develop in whatever you feel like :-) … “Big wheels keep on turning.”
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Download a Windows Media Version Here ~37mb