Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 16 December 2008 11:13
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Shrugging off the exclusion from the NBN process, Telstra has leveraged
technology from a company called “CoolIRIS” to deliver a pretty “3D”
news wall that also shows images and videos from a range of other
sites, including YouTube, Deviant Art, Google and others – but is it
real 3D?
Although the new “3D news wall” technology available over at the new
BigPond News
site is quite pretty, showing you an image “wall” on an angle that is
sort of 3D-ish, it’s the same sort of thing as calling Telstra’s “
holographic demo” of a few months ago a true hologram.
That hologram wasn’t a true hologram at all, but instead a very clever
projection. Similarly, there’s no true “3D” to be seen at BigPond News
3D, although the CoolIRIS technology does look cool.
Telstra Media Group MD Justin Milne called it a “visually stunning
fly-through picture wall” and has dubbed it “BigPond News 3D”.
Milne said: “The Internet and mobile phones have made it simpler and
quicker for people to find out what is happening in the world and our
upgrade to our BigPond News service means we can now give our customers
even more news across a range of categories.
“BigPond now offers an online interactive image wall service, BigPond
News 3D, that allows you to rapidly scroll through a virtual wall of
pictures and by simply clicking an image, you will be instantly taken
to the news story, a new way of presenting news online and a first in
Australia from BigPond,” Mr Milne said.
The CoolIRIS application also lets you visually see a wall of images
and videos from a range of other sites using a “search tool” in the top
right hand corner, making it an alternate way to browse Google,
YouTube, Deviant Art and several other sites.
To access CoolIRIS, you’ll need Firefox 2 or 3 on your PC or Mac,
Internet Explorer on your PC, or Safari on your Mac, and you’ll need to
download the appropriate plug-in. There are no Google Chrome or Opera
browser plug-ins as yet.
Unfortunately, despite Milne’s statements about “mobile phones” making
it “simpler and quicker for people to find out what is happening in the
world, (etc etc)”, a note at the end of Telstra’s press release on the
topic says: “The BigPond News 3D wall, powered by CoolIris, is only
available online and not on mobile.”
Well, why not Telstra? A quick look at the iTunes App Store on the
iPhone shows that the CoolIRIS application does indeed exist for free
download. Sure, it might not be available for the rest of the mobile
world, but if you’d wanted to, a BigPond News 3D service could have
been made available for iPhone users.
I guess that’s just a bit of nitpicking, and because dealing with
tiresome Linux zealots earlier in the day has made me a bit grumpy,
mainly because dealing with zealots (especially of the mind-warping
Linux variety) is always a tiresome,
bang-your-head-against-a-brick-wall kind of affair, but still: Telstra
could have made it happen for the launch if it wanted to. I guess with
the NBN exlcusion, ordering up a customised iPhone version of the
BigPond 3D news wall wasn't high up on the list of spending priorities.
Beyond the nitpicking and the Linux zealots, BigPond News has a more
useful addition: “up to 180 video news updates per day, including
hourly bulletins, sport, entertainment, politics and business wraps,
available online and on mobiles”. Ah, this time mobiles are included,
making me a bit less grumpy.
So, what else does Telsta have to say about its upgrades to the BigPond
News service, and just how popular has it been since it launched
several weeks ago in October?
Please read on to page 2.
