January 3rd, 2008
Cynergy unveils Cynergy Labs and Project Maestro
Cynergy, a company that has been steadily expanding and leading in the rich Internet application development space announced a new initiative, Cynergy Labs, that is dedicated to testing and exploring new UI paradigms and uses for RIA technologies. The first example is Project Maestro, a multi-touch interface a lot like Microsoft Surface that’s built with WPF and uses a camera combined with special gloves to give a kind of faux 3D environment like you saw in Minority Report. You use the gloves and the camera to manipulate objects in the air just like you would on your iPhone or on the Surface table.
It’s exactly the kind of thing we need more of in the RIA world. It isn’t incredibly useful, but it’s testing the waters and making people think. That seems to be the goal of Cynergy Labs. I talked to Dave Wolf, the VP of Consulting at Cynergy said that Labs was built:
“as a place for Cynergy developers to bring forward ideas that are relevant and realistic. They should present technology research that provides real world value to our customers and the RIA community. Like Science Fiction with an application. We then provide the place and the funding to make them come alive. There are some amazing things cooking up next around Flex and Silverlight including new interactive controls, powerful new kinds of data visualizations and more and more desktop and device integration.”
There’s a lot of cool stuff going on with people testing out new things on top of RIA technologies. We saw Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann do this with their Majority Desk application which used Flex and the Wiimotes as the interface tools. Hopefully Cynergy Labs will foster that kind of out of box hacking that turns into really cool ideas.
Cynergy has also been on a tear recently. They’ve expanded and now have offices in Sydney, Taipei, and London in addition to their offices in Washington DC, Rodchester, Grand Rapids and San Diego. They’re doing Silverlight and WPF work in addition to Flex so they’re getting a lot of knowledge about a broad range of technologies. They’re a company to watch this year. They’ve gone from being a straight RIA shop to a trend setting company.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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