I have written before about PicLens, the immersive image browsing tool plugin for web browsers. Recently the creators of PicLens released a significant upgrade. As a result the product is now called Cooliris. The upgrade allows you to not onlyview still images, but also video clips in a type of video wall that fills your computer screen with an interface that mimics the touch interface found on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The result is an interesting and unique way of navigating collections of images and video. An interesting way to experience this is to do a Google Image search. The results returned from Google are displayed in a table format. Clicking the CoolIris button on your browser takes those same images and displays them in the Cooliris image wall. Quite frankly a much more interesting and intutiive way to search for images. This also works with a number of other image sites including Flickr, SmugMug, YouTube, Yahoo and Photobucket.
In addition to viewing web content, you can also utilize this tool for presentations and for viewing your own images. In the example below I exported some slides from a PowerPoint presentation and opened them in the Firefox web browser. By invoking the Cooliris tool I now can browse my slides using the Cooliris interface. All in all Cooliris is a unique and interesting way to interact with images and video on the web and on your desktop.
