Healthcare is a complex topic. The science is bleeding-edge and constantly evolving, and the concepts are often very abstract. With those challenges in mind, we approached Episode 7 of The GE Show with ambitious goals – to explain the way 3D medical images are produced, to demonstrate the future of personalized cancer care, and to show how aggregate data visualization is changing the way we think about individual medical cases.

(Not familiar with The GE Show? It’s a episodic series we make with GE, showcasing their technology, people, and problem-solving in inventive ways.)

So you know how TBG is known for creating cool stuff for the internet? Well did you know that sometimes we also make cool stuff not for the internet but FROM the internet?

Enter a fun little project we just completed, stationed at the Hudson Hotel in NYC…

For New York’s Spring 2012 Fashion Week, Morgans Hotel Group wanted to change up what they normally do in Hudson Hall, their dining hall that looks over 57th Street on one side and into their ivy covered Private Park on another. Instead of the showing the usual music videos and sporting events, they wanted to fill the space with something that was relevant to the fashionistas and fashion bloggers that would be hanging in the hall during their stay for the event. As soon as we saw the space, with walls are composed of a continuous Mondrian-esque mosaic of frames, we knew what we wanted to do. It served as a perfect canvas for displaying real-time images and quotes from popular fashion week blogs, and a perfect way to showcase Morgans’ partnership with Tumblr.

Using Tumblr’s API to pull text and images, and Flash to display it all, we created a series of files that can be matched up with the existing projection system. The content prior to the installation took up large areas on the walls of the hall, but our designs aimed to use the beauty of the frame compositions to fit the content perfectly inside each and every frame. The design is displayed in blocks of text, images and patterns that mimic Morgans’ branding to keep it looking fresh and modern, and to keep the walls ever-changing, the content is refreshed through transitions while the installation updates with new text and images as they are entered into Tumblr.

Morgans liked the idea so much that they asked us to find a way to have it live beyond Fashion Week, so we made the design diverse enough to work with other special events or everyday happenings that they might want to showcase.

The installation is now live and can be seen during dining hours. So next time you’re in the Hudson Hotel, head down to Hudson Hall, grab some food and enjoy the installation.

The Hudson Hotel is located at 356 West 58th Street (at 9th Ave) in NYC.

Sometimes, you have to post to remote servers and you don’t want jerks posting invalid data. Here’s a recipe I’ve used that works pretty well and isn’t that hard to drop into existing code.

Have you ever completed a flash project and started testing it online only to realize that the swf is looking for assets either in a different directory than the one you specified? Or that the folder that you have all your media stored is not in a relative directory like it was when working on it locally? There’s an easy solution that can be implemented without messing with any actionscript code.

Like us, you’ve probably heard those words before. Did you ever wonder what “Seven Whole Grains on a Mission” really means? What are these seven whole grains? What’s the mission? Can grains even go on a mission?

In 2009, Kashi asked us to create an immersive and engaging experience to tell their 7WGOAM story—what these grains are, how they work together, and introduce their grain sourcing map, where you can see where their grains are grown. Along with doing all of these things, this experience also had to express the spirit of Kashi and its people. It took us a couple of years, but we’re very happy and proud to announce that we’ve finally launched Seven Whole Grains on a Mission.

We think it does everything it’s supposed to do, with a little smidge of TLC thrown in.

The Barbarian Group’s user experience team is going behind-the-scenes to show and discuss some of our kickass work. We’ll chat about our latest projects, and how we tackled them. First up: Tweet Wrap.

We launched Tweet Wrap in early December to rave reviews about the project’s concept, design and ease-of-use. The site, created as part of our Boosted campaign for Samsung and Intel, allows users to create their own customizable wrapping paper using tweets.

Chad Vavra, TBG’s interaction design director and the UX lead on the project, sat down to discuss how his portion of the project came to be. Read on!

The holidays are upon us! And you know what that means—helping futuristic jetpack-riding elves make some kick-butt toys enhanced with the latest tech from GE. No? Well, it is now!

You might remember when we redesigned Santa’s Sleigh last year incorporating all of GE’s sweet new innovations. Well, this year we’re taking it to the workshop! Earn points by pairing up each GE technology with its matching toy. Once they’re GE-enhanced, they get sent off to Santa to deliver. We’re featuring 6 of GE’s coolest new technologies in the game—and while they may seem futuristic, these things really exist! You’ve gotta see the stuff they’ve been working on, it really is mind-blowing.

And of course, you can flaunt your score all over the place—challenge your Facebook friends, print a certificate of completion and hang it above your desk, send an email to your mum—but we’ll leave that part up to you.

So grab your carbon fiber hoverboards and fly on over to play the game! It’s catchy. And once you’ve finished, post your score up on the Edison’s Desk Facebook page. GE is donating $5 to Toys for Tots for every post. If that doesn’t make you feel all warm and Christmasy inside, we don’t know what will. Plus, we love seeing who’s the first to beat our high scores.

On a recent project I found myself needing a basic particle engine, long story short that part of the site never made it to launch but the desire to play around with particles stuck with me.

I have also always been meaning to go over Daniel Shiffman’s Nature of Code tutorials. Robert always recommends them as a good starting place to understand vectors. With the addition of a native Vector3D class in AS3 for Flash Player 10 that I had never played around with, this was a perfect storm of new toys.