"...many of the sciences are so abstract, and the amount of things you have to learn before you start connecting to those practical issues can be very daunting." - Bill Gates
Microsoft Research has been releasing a lot of interesting projects this year - Songsmith, an improved Translator, WorldWide Telescope (WWT) and now Project Tuva. Some of them are offbeat and path-breaking.
Project Tuva is an interactive educational video application built with Silverlight.
Project Tuva is an interactive video experience that makes learning about science relevant and exciting through annotations authored by researchers and subject-matter experts. Project Tuva is launching with Richard Feynman's Messenger Series lectures, a cornerstone set of seven talks at Cornell University in 1964. These videos are enhanced with a number of different layers of contextual information: full transcripts and captions, fully searchable transcripts, time-synchronized contextual "extras" that link to web resources to learn more about a spoken topic, the ability to take notes while watching, integration with Microsoft Research's own amazing World Wide Telescope project, and more.
Written in Silverlight, it uses Smooth Streaming to dynamically switch between different bit rates of video without interrupting playback. This allows the video to play in a way that's more immediate than the usual buffer-then-watch online video experience. It uses a sophisticated and fully liquid layout system to adapt to different screen sizes and viewing aspect ratios. All modifications the user makes to the interface's layout are remembered between sessions.