Cooliris – Visualization of searching media
I found a fascinating plug-in for firefox — Cooliris. (Maybe some of you already know it.)
It is about visualizing multimedia contents searched by search engine like Google. I think it could be a good example of the importance of information presentation.
While Cooliris basically shows the same data as Google does, Cooliris gives much better experience and navigation. Let me show some screenshots that I took by myself.
The picture above is a normal view of the result of Google search with keyword “ontology.” Then how about Cooliris?
Cooliris provides a full 3D stack of image search results. I think this kind of presentation would really enhance user experience in searching, although it just shows the same things.
[Added later]
I think that I described this in a poor manner. As Nick explained in comment, I just captured one of dynamically moving scene. I can navigate the collection by dragging mouse and enlarge what I want to see in detail by clicking on the picture.
Benjamin Said,
October 20, 2008 @ 6:49 pm
How is it better? Looks like an angled view of the same thing – and if you use the mouse’s scroll wheel to scroll your google results, might actually be slower?
Nick Rabinowitz Said,
October 20, 2008 @ 8:23 pm
I’ve seen this in action, and Ben, you need to try it out to get it – it’s actually a pretty solid UI for navigating photos, especially really large collections of photos. It’s sort of gesture-driven, a little reminiscent of the iPod, and it deals quite well with lengthy or endless sets – you can go through much faster than on the Google image search results page.
Jonathan Breitbart Said,
October 24, 2008 @ 12:42 pm
Yes, Cooliris is a pretty neat UI for photo collections. It also doesn’t just operate on image searches, but automatically recognizes photo collections, like sets on Flickr or Picasa Web Albums, as well as Facebook image sets, etc. I also actually know one of the developers (he’s a former member of my girlfriend’s salsa team!). They’re based in Menlo Park. They also have an iPhone version now.
Another useful plugin developed by the same company is CoolPreviews, which allows you to mouse over a link and preview the website it points to in a smaller window. I actually find myself using CoolPreviews more often than Cooliris – it’s very handy.