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Response to I want to spend the next year of my life emulating this guy's work. Does that make me lame?

from John Kantor (jkantor@mindspring.com)
The new Apple Powerbook has a wide-aspect-ratio screen. (Only a bit wider at 1152, but still noticeable.)

And about a year ago, I started the design for an online magazine - which was to be completely designed around horizontal panoramas (panels approximately 3 normal screens wide). For a low-bandwidth version I was intending simply to mix headlines, thumbnails, and graphics. Clicking on one would open up a popup with the full text or high-res version, or launch a separate video. Not too different from what we have now, but better suited to the web.

A high bandwidth version would be where the idea would be fully realized. It would have full-size - but static - graphics right on the panel. (No annoying self-running ones.) Mousing over one would activate it in place (launch a preview slide show, video, or animation). Clicking on it would allow you to interact with it there or to open up a new popup that you could move as you wished or dock so that it didn't scroll. (Of course, it might link you to an entirely new panel as well - of which the video or graphic was just a teaser.) A nonscrolling frame at the top would provide a consistent top-level menu, while a non-scrolling frame at the bottom would provide a panel-sensitive one.

To fully implement something like this, however, requires features not implemented (or not implemented well) in current browsers - in particular the ability to embed video and animation seamlessly on the page, positional scrolling (as in many computer games or even Microsoft Office applications) so that scroll bars can be done away with, live overlapping windows (so that you could be watching a video in a popup as you scroll through a panel that it overlays), transparent overlaying of text and graphics on video, as well as hotspots on video itself - so that, for example, you could click on the shirt your favorite rock star is wearing and buy it instantly.

Panels would be thought of as being layered on top of each other, so that when you clicked on a link you would go "up" or "down" to another level (or "over" to another related location). (It's really much closer to the spatial metaphor of a computer game.) The user would also be able to create his own panels, by clicking and dragging bits of content onto them. The idea is to combine a much more natural type of interactivity with more personalization. (It's also much more suitable to adaptation to a minibrowser - such as might be found on a cell phone or pda.)

Most importantly for business purposes, the banner ad is done away with through these techniques and replaced with what is essentially an interactive version of the full-page magazine ad. The boundary between advertising and content becomes problematized: "advertisements" are interactive and (hopefully) informative, and both "articles" and "entertainment" provide instant links to the people and products featured (becoming just different entry points into our society's materialist space).

Anyway the future of the web doesn't lie with you or me, it lies with the generation who currently doesn't have to squint at the high-res screens and who will grow up with not only the internet, but with enough processing power and bandwidth to be able to do anything they can imagine - rather than only what current technology will allow.

(posted 8434 days ago)

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