It’s a personal tool; it allows you to peruse and then bring full-centre any item, displaying associated imagery as items are picked. It shows content from feeds of your choosing, and spins them around the centre of your screen. You can adjust spin speeds, change the viewing mode, and variously adjust and tweak the interface to your hearts’ content.

It’s slick and playful; it’s an interesting starting point for further exploration of information presentation, particularly relating to information with currency and a lifecycle.

There’s a few things that niggle me about it, though;

1. It demands a whole screen. I bet it’s great on a projected second screen; the pixel density is so high for legible 3d text, however, that it can’t reasonably fit into a smaller, quarter-screen sized window.
2. It lives in a single window; even if the visualisation were a desktop background, where it could exist quite nicely, there’s no mechanism to bring those news items into play with the other parts of the system where notification or announcements happen. It can only be engaged with when it has full and total control of the desktop.
3. Other than categorisation, there’s no reason for the visual appearance; the flickbook is nice, but it doesn’t really benefit from the additional 3d interface. The 3d itself is fairly underused, in fact; for 6 degrees of movement, only angle and vertical position are employed. All manner of attribute mappings could be employed to extend and benefit from the metaphor (size for article length, distance from center for popularity, etc)
4. Trying to view any content requires being bumped out to another window or screen; what’s the need? Surely an interface this rich and fleshy can handle displaying text and images together with it?
5. I’ve marked out which areas can be interacted with by not hatching them in this picture. There’s not much you can click in. I want to be able to click and spin the news tornado! I want to click an individual item and pull it to the middle. I want to pull items out into my own collection, or throw items away I don’t like. There’s a whole stack of gestural interface that could be hooked in here, and tied up with the rich metadata associated with each story, some really interesting analytics could be happening in the background using an almost invisible, non-explicit interface. I’d say this is the most missed trick here – it could be a news appliance, rather than a visual hack.

We’re starting to hit that point where a rich media platform, open data, and pervasive networking is accessible to everyone; new formats are emerging, and data is being decoupled from presentation leading to more projects like this. It will be interesting to see over the next few years what paradigms come to dominate; I remember in the games industry as 3d transitioned from being an adjective to a gimmick, before that tipping point where to be not in 3d was a gimmick. Will 3d find a justifiable space in infoviz and even desktop manipulation?