istartedsomething

Alternate Windows Vista animation

March 15th, 2007 AEST by Long Zheng
Jump to comments

Look what I found on MSDN! This neat animation comes from a technology demo made by Microsoft Japan. The particular demo (.NET 3.0 framework required) was produced to show off the functionality of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in a 3D interactive environment. Unexpectedly, it had this interesting splash animation for Windows Vista with flying colors that come together to form the Windows logo, along with an unique soundtrack.

[QUICKTIME http://www.istartedsomething.com/uploads/vistaanim.mov http://www.istartedsomething.com/uploads/vistaanim_poster.mov 600 410 true false]

The interaction of colors and sound feels almost like a mix between the Sony PSP and Nintendo Wii start-up animation which both share a similar style. Maybe even the music in the background was an ‘alternative’ start-up sound? Certainly something as cool as this could have been used as the animation during boot to replace the pearl, but at around 8 seconds long, it might have been somewhat obtrusive.

I apologize for the jerky video capture. The real animation is actually very smooth, however, any screen capture softwares I tried couldn’t keep up, so here’s the best I could do.But please check out the video in the demo for yourself! Besides this cool animation, the demo also showcases the wacky and weird world of Japanese creativity.

Update: Thanks John for pointing out where to get the video! It looks like the original video file was cached was available right under my nose the whole time, now I feel stupid.

Update 2: It looks like this animation and soundtrack was not produced internally by Microsoft. Most probably by the same developers who made the technology demo, Bascule.