We’ve taken out the text and created an immersive experience to help you lose yourself in exploration. Trailers for bestselling movies. Insight into the hottest TV shows and video games. Track samples from Tuesday’s new music releases. Audio reviews of books you should read. Amazon Windowshop lets you get a taste of many titles. They’re here – in one place – and all you have to do is move a few keys to zoom in on whatever flips your switch.

• search-cube is a new visual search engine that allows previews of up to ninety-six websites, videos and images. Combining results from Google with images from Thumbshots, it creates a rotating 3D cube that the user can manipulated to browse the results. While it lacks any ranking capability, it is still an interesting variation on the search engine. Would it be a good way to present search results from an OPAC?

• If your interest was piqued by my previous entry on the Microsoft Surface, you can now have one for your own home, for a mere $350 dollars and some sweat and tears (tip o’ the hat to Captain Fold).

• Trying to collaborate on a project and need to share your computer screen? Have a look at Pocket Meeting, which can do just that for a one time fee of $5. A quick user review is available from ReadWriteWeb.

I have spoken about the impact of multi-touch computer screens on the catalogue display, including the work of  Jeff Han and Microsoft Surface. Now Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry from MIT unveil the latest development, SixthSense.

‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.

Beyond the influence something like this would have on library services, for example, the ultimate roving reference or patron’s getting information from books via the catalog as they take them off the shelves (see the video at 5:53), imagine what this would mean for the library’s physical space. As the image must be projected onto a surface, it offers numerous possibilities for interaction between the environment and the information you are seeking. Is this the beginning of Information Decoration as described by Koert van Mensvoort?

We use these flat rectangular objects to inform ourselves about the state of our world. Computer-monitor workers are the assembly line workers of the 21st century. We use screens to check our e-mail, screens to monitor safety on the streets, screens to follow fashion; our scientists use screens to explore the outer limits of the universe and to descend into the structures of our genes. A painful truth: many of us spend more time with computer monitors than with our own friends and families.

…The merging of virtual and physical spaces is an inevitable development, and we should welcome it….

The million-dollar question is: How do we integrate all those indispensable information streams into our environment? Besides the fact that we can learn a lot from old nature, where information is present in a well-integrated way, I think we can learn from the decorative world. For centuries, people have been utilising decorative patterns, indoors and out, with the aim of improving and giving an identity to the atmosphere around them. The primary goal is not information but aesthetics. What happens if we start looking at every pattern in our environment as a possible information carrier? Look around you, wherever you are. Try to recognise all of the forms and patterns in the space. The flowered wallpaper, the humming of the air-conditioning, the fish in the aquarium, a shadow on the wall. Do you realise how few of the patterns in our environment are being used as information carriers?

In an earlier post I discussed the possible impact of multi-touch computer screens on the catalogue display. Microsoft has just demonstrated the latest version of their software at the South by SouthWest Festival. While it is still in the development stage, it doesn`t stop us from imagining the possibilities.

According to the original story on the BBC

Devices like the Surface, as well as Apple’s iPhone, are at the vanguard of a shift in how we interact with computers.
“Everything is moving to touch and multi-touch so you had better jump on that bandwagon,” Mr Klimczak told the conference of web developers.

…information visualization can be enriched with the principles of creative design and art, to develop valuable data representations that address the emotional experience of users, instead of solely focusing on typical task effectiveness metrics. As information access enters the everyday life of users and becomes increasingly ubiquitous and pervasive, novel approaches are required that take into account considerations of user engagement and visual aesthetics. Instead of evaluating such information applications by measuring task performance and comprehension effectiveness, one should consider to determine user interest, attention, focus, enjoyment and curiosity.

If you want to find out more, an excellent presentation by Eric Rodenbeck on mapping and data visualization has just been posted at Information Aesthetics, along with a few others that are worth checking out.

I’ve been using the following programs, each of which takes a slightly different approach to the visual presentation of data, and I’ve found them useful and fun.

Newsmap is “an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator.” I’ve found it far easier to glance through this when catching up on recent events, rather than using RSS or a regular news site, and it is also pleasing to look at!

PicLens turns the browser into a full-screen, 3D viewer for photos and videos, allowing you to see and scroll through large numbers of images quickly. It’s very useful when looking for images on Flickr and totally unobtrusive. When a page has a number of images to display, a small arrow appears in the corner of each image when rolled over and clicking on the arrow opens the image browser.

Similar to PicLens is SpaceTime, which allows you to display all your search results at once, again in a 3D viewer, eliminating the need to click through many web pages searching for results.

If anyone has suggestions for similar programs that they use, let me know by leaving a comment.