From the Microsoft Live Labs comes a new and ambitious experiment called Pivot. It allows a user to browse huge lists of items in a powerful, informative and fun way. Pivot strives to deliver an experience of easily jumping from macro- to microview and back. Visually speaking we can scan through thousends of items in one moment and the next moment examinie a tiny detail of one item.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZuFUZpEZ-A

Starting point

When we use the Web today we treat the most fundamental scenarios as separate activities. Search takes us from many things to one, browsing moves us from one thing to another, and recommendations expose affinities that enable us to explore related topics. Can we do better by combining these scenarios into a more unified experience?

Collections

Items are combined into groups called Collections.These are the builing-blocks of the Pivot interaction and visualization model. The collections reveal hidden patterns to the user and thus allows to discover new insights about the relationships, similarities and dependencies.

Pivot is based on the Seadragon technology and currently available by invitation to a small technical audience. The product website holds more information about the technical side of the application.

Read the articles on visitmix.com/lab/

MSNBC really made an effort for the inauguration of Barack Obama. The Photosynth website is hosting photosynths from the inaugural stands an a LiveSearchMaps application online. If you’re not familiar with with the incredible technique of Photosynth let Microsoft LiveLab descibe it to you:

Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to build a model of where the photos were taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos.

By the way: CNN presented it’s own Photosynth application on a multi-touch table combining to cutting edge technologies in mainstream television.

Furthermore MSNBC has introduced a new video player including transcripts with the ability to jump through the video using the text as a navigation tool… but there’s more: use text selection to make a snippet from the video stream and implement it everywhere.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXqZWp0EHmw

To learn more about the project around the capturing of the inauguration read the official blogpost.

To learn more about the possibilities of Photosynth, go to the project site from LiveLabs, watch the TED talk where the technique was first introduced by Blaise Agüera.

Hat tip to Nathan from FlowingData