CoolIris is exactly that... cool...

Last week I lamented at some length about the limited offerings for viewing digitally converged media on HDTV's, as well as a bit of frustration that people I know with HDTV's and digital cameras don't really seem to care if one ever sees the other - except maybe on a blind date set up by a DVD.
I'm positive that one of the key reasons for the lack of a clear winner in this field is that is creating a user interface to navigate a thousands of items (be they MP3s, pictures, or files) easily and intuitively is not an easy task. MP3s at least have a somewhat predictable hierarchy that we've all used for years in our record collections: Artist> Album> Song. Add genres and you've got a fairly quick drill-down structure you can utilize. Plus you've always got the fall-back position of doing a text search for the name. Fortunately MP3s are tagged internally in a consistent way, so the music's tag information is carried with each copy, can be extracted automatically and doesn't need to be retyped each time a copy is created.

Historically that approach hasn't worked well with photos in JPG - though geocoding and facial recognition from Picassa, Facebook, and others are helping close the gap.(Another subject for another post). But navigating thousands of pictures is still daunting - especially if you know the picture you want, but aren't sure exactly when it was taken or where. Enter Cooliris.

If you haven't seen CoolIris, go download and try it now. And then, come back. I'll wait.... :-)
http://www.cooliris.com

CoolIris is a browser-based technology that presents a smoothly scrolling "video wall" in an extremely intuitive interface. Slide the mouse left or right and the wall zooms by. If something catches your eye, you naturally slow down, and CoolIris zooms in subtly and predictably. Zoom in a bit more with the click wheel and the selected "monitor" enlarges surrounded by metadata about the video, and play controls appear. Click play to watch or zoom back out and keep sliding.

Stunningly simply, incredibly intuitive, and so very cool. And I think it's the perfect interface for a home media center.

Amazingly, CoolIris runs as a full-screen browser plug-in, which reduces the amount of proprietary code anyone wanting to utilize it would need to write. And the company has created a well-documented API programming interface so developers can optimize their sites to be "CoolIris" enabled. That's a huge plus. It currently works with both videos and photos - so navigating mp3s with cover art shouldn't be much of a stretch. YouTube, Hulu, Flickr, Picasaweb (among others) are all enabled out of the box - which alone makes it perfect for the living room. A list of "categories" on the left - News, TV, Movies, etc add dimensions to the hierarchies it could navigate, and one could even envision "walls behind walls" as an organizational technique.

Today it only runs against items on the web, but that's actually a good thing: it's well known and well optimized. We've been serving up photos via a web server for years. The photo collection in the top image is from my Picasaweb, not my local machine or my network, and it's still wonderfully fast scrolling. But if CoolIris can scroll that library from the web, with a speed that truly pleases, this has a lot of amazing potential over a home network.

Since when do I complain about something one week and get a fix for it the next? My life doesn't work like that.