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Piclens & Tiltviewer: 3D image viewing goodness

01 Feb 2008 @ 08:10 am · 14 Comments ·

Good morning everyone,

Alan Levine recently pointed his twitter network and blog readers to Piclens, a cool free Mac application (and now, a Firefox extension!) that does AMAZING things with your photos. You have to see this thing to believe it! It (the Firefox extension, specifically) takes a stream of photos and renders it in a immersive, interactive 3D wall. Here is my one of my photosets on Flickr, called School:

piclens1.jpg

From here, you click, drag, spin and zoom your way to individual pictures, which can be brought to full screen:

piclens2.jpg

There’s even a handy slide-viewer mode:

piclens3.jpg

This has to be the coolest thing I’ve seen all week (and I see a lot of cool stuff!) It’s right up there with what was going to be my pick of the week, Tiltviewer:

tiltviewer2.jpg

Tiltviewer is a little different in that there is no application to download or extension to install, but rather, it pulls from a Flickr stream based on user ID, group ID, or tags.

I can’t decide which of these tools I like better; both are amazing, and I’m positively DYING to try one of them in an upcoming presentation! I used similar technology called Splashr at a conference presentation about Second Life in Philadelphia last March. It blew the crowd away, but Piclens and Tiltviewer make Splashr look like yesterday’s news! Definitely have some fun with these tools over the weekend! Oh wait, there’s a football game on Sunday, right? ;-) GO GIANTS!

Hope this helps,

-kj-

Tags: Digital Imaging · Just Too Cool!

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14 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Louise Maine // Feb 1, 2008 at 10:24 am

    Wow these are cool! Thanks for sharing the cool toys. My kids will flip when they see these!

  • 2 Riptide Furse // Feb 1, 2008 at 3:17 pm

    Hey KJ – Way cool. I almost didn’t look much at Piclens misreading that it was Mac only but was happy to see that the Firefox extension is multiplatform. I’ve been having a blast.

    Here’s another one similar to Piclens but it does your SEARCHES in 3D. take a look at Space Time http://spacetime.com/

  • 3 Kevin Jarrett // Feb 2, 2008 at 11:48 am

    Louise,

    So glad you’re enjoying them! These tools really do make looking at pictures easy and fun.

    Riptide,

    I didn’t even KNOW there was a Mac client at first! Wondering why you’d bother, especially since the 3D interface isn’t available unless you use the FF extension! Nutty.

    I just checked out SpaceTime. Oh. My. GOD!!! It’s PC-only right now … without a Mac version I can’t really use it (I depend on my Macbook Pro on the road, I guess it would work within Parallels, I’m gonna go try that!) Too cool!

    -kj-

  • 4 Jessica // Feb 5, 2008 at 6:00 pm

    Thanks so much for posting about PicLens 1.6. We really appreciate it!

    For interested readers, below are links to two videos demos, one by our team and the other by a PicLens fan!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utySPFH_HlA
    http://www.vimeo.com/653047

    Thanks, again.
    Jessica & The Cooliris Team

  • 5 Ravi // May 5, 2008 at 3:35 am

    is there any software for viewing offline pics (those on my comp) in a similar way to piclens

  • 6 Kevin Jarrett // May 5, 2008 at 4:01 am

    Hi Ravi,

    Not that I’m aware of … I thought PicLens had an offline counterpart, seems I’m mistaken!

    -kj-

  • 7 Ravi // May 7, 2008 at 6:40 am

    so ain’t there any software?

  • 8 Kevin Jarrett // May 7, 2008 at 7:07 am

    Hi Ravi,

    Sure there is. It’s just on the web!

    -kj-

  • 9 Ravi // May 7, 2008 at 10:59 am

    ??

  • 10 Kevin Jarrett // May 7, 2008 at 11:09 am

    Sorry for being unclear, Ravi. Piclens is a plugin for Firefox or Safari. As far as I can tell, there is no “standalone” program, something you would install and run separately, to get the same effect. In other words, you have to use Firefox or Safari to use Piclens. Does that help?

  • 11 Ravi // May 8, 2008 at 1:45 pm

    ya thnx kevin :)
    but plz let me know if any such software comes

  • 12 Cassy // Jun 10, 2009 at 2:20 am

    Any update on this? is there a standalone software for 3d photo viewing yet?

  • 13 Cassy // Jun 10, 2009 at 2:21 am

    Hi Kevin/ Ravi

    I have been trying to search for such a software but am unable to do so.

    Any update on this? is there a standalone software for 3d photo viewing yet?

  • 14 Kevin Jarrett // Jun 10, 2009 at 4:32 am

    Cassy,

    Define ’standalone’ … there is something called Piclens publisher:

    http://developer.cooliris.com/?p=publisher

    But you still need a web browser to view the galleries it creates…

    -kj-

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