I’m writing this post because, frankly, I’m a sucker for technology and I needed to share this brilliant tool for viewing photos online.

PicLens is what’s know as an “Immersive slideshow”. It allows you to experience photos in a very multi-dimensional way.

It is a web browser plugin that provides interactive full-screen slideshows of online images. The plugin is available for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

At present, the software is compatible with Google Images, Yahoo Images, Ask.com Images, deviantART, Flickr, Facebook, Live image search, Photobucket, SmugMug, Fotki and any web site that implements mediaRSS <link> tags in their HTML pages. [from Wikipedia]

Even our Internet Entrepreneurship blog has PicLens enabled! So, if we were ever to post a bunch of pictures they would be viewable with PicLens.

Most recently they added support for YouTube videos. This seemed a little buggy but worked alright. Another feature they are going to add, is the ability to click and save an image in the slideshow.

See a 2 minute demonstration of how it works in this video below…

Admittedly this may not be the most practical tool, even though it looks amazing. But will these types of online 3D experiences become mainstream? This is cutting edge technology internet entrepreneurs must think hard about and implement this technology in useful ways.

Already, there are search engines using this type of environment. SpaceTime ( a 3D browser) and 3b rooms which is a 3D city with website storefronts. The newest is viewzi which acts a bit like PicLens but for visual searching. (viewzi is still in private beta but you can request access)

Try it out! Comment and let me know what you think and is there a future for this technology?

[piclens-lite-link]

I think its more fitting, in a way, to have a video explaining Second Life than text. So, checkout this YouTube video of Second Life. (4:13) I thought the part about Star Wars "roleplaying" was a hysterical idea. Sorry, but I can just picture a bunch of these "avatars" playing from their mom's basement.

I came across this great article by Sean Ammirati, a Grove City College CIS grad and VP of Business Development and Product Management for mSpoke. He came and spoke at Grove recently and was an incredible speaker. Very inspiring! A few interesting points from the article… The attrition rate for Second Life is horrible for the first 3.5 hours of a user's experience (overall 90%) . If they meet another avatar their chance of staying increases greatly.

1) Do the users who like it, like it a lot? Yes 2) Do a lot of users like it? No