There’s been a distinct trend lately toward multi-screen views for online video applications. The Olympics Silverlight player included four screens for watching multiple events simultaneously. Verizon and the NFL are once again offering multiple camera angles for football games to online subscribers. And now Ars Technica reports on the latest from CoolIris and its browser plugin PicLens, which lays out search results visually, allowing users to scan across images and launch different video feeds from a single browser page.
The increasingly visual Web is a channel-surfer’s dream. (Though a cynical part of me wonders if we’re once again dumbing down the info-gathering process by eliminating the need to read anything…) The bandwidth implications, however, are a bit worrisome. From a consumer perspective, the more we see bandwidth caps and Internet slow-downs during heavy usage periods, the more applications like PicLens seem unrealistic for every-day use. It’s a never-ending battle. Internet bandwidth increases, and new heavy-bandwidth applications are introduced.
On a lighter note, check out the gallery of PicLens screenshots below. The app currently supports content from Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, SmugMug, Google, Yahoo, DeviantArt and Photobucket. I’m planning to download the full application and give it a real test run soon. Drop a comment if you’ve already tried it out.
