imported post from Digital Curation blog
Cooliris, is a 3-D image wall that allows you to visually browse images, whether they be in Google Image, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, images in one’s harddrive and recent versions of the photo database program Adobe Lightroom.
I was sad to discover that I could not download this program to my own Mac Mini as it features Mac OX 10.4, Power PC, and apparently I cannot upgrade to the necessary Leopard version that supports Cooliris. Update: Previous versions (tho unsupported) are available.
You can share your 3-D image wall through a url, as well as bookmark and save it. It allows one to “jump freely” through Flickr image pools and sets – though not sure how that differs from the current way we maneuver from image pools to sets – does “jump freely” = “move fluidly?” Not sure.
It claims usability with hundreds of sites due to its being built around Media RSS format. It advertises its ability to be used to view numerous television and movie episodes on Hulu, etc. Its slideshow feature allows one to double click and launch slide shows that one can pause and rewind. It claims to have the fastest way online to search images with its’ style of “zipping” through the 3-D image wall.
Again this makes me think back to the Visible Archive from Australia – and its archival metadata visualization. If there was a way to integrate these technologies and allow one to browse visualizations of data – the future could be very exciting.