The Visualizing Player

Yesterday Visualizing.org launched version 1.0 of their Visualizing Player, a media player designed specifically for embedding and displaying infographics and data visualizations.

Perhaps its best feature is that it’s nearly agnostic of the visualization format. Right now it supports HTML5, Java, Flash, PDF, Video, Image, and whole websites. Functionality of the player adapts to each format; interactive visualizations and videos are launched via a play button, high resolution images can be zoomed and panned to explore details.

It also features a full-screen mode which launches a seperate browser window and is especially suited for interactive visualizations. It allows the user to favorite (account required), share and embed, and download a visualization. As Visualizing.org is one of the few platforms that cares for proper licensing (all content is CC-licensed), you won’t have to worry about being allowed to embed and share visualizations with the Visualizing Player.

Here’s what an embedded interactive Flash visualization looks like:

And a static infographic (with zoom and pan functionality):

As with any 1.0 release, there are still a few quirks and loose ends. Especially when displaying website and HTML content, there sometimes seem to be scaling issues and too many scrollbars appear. Some visualizations work around this by launching directly in full screen mode (like Jan Willem Tulp’s Ghost Counties). Also, when panning an image, it inadvertently sticks to the cursor when the mouse is released outside of the Player and then re-enters. But I’m sure the people at Visualizing.org are working hard to release an even better version 1.1.

Small issues aside, we’re pretty excited and think the Visualizing Player is a terrific tool for people to embed and share visualizations. It offers great features for displaying properly licensed interactive and static content, and goes beyond embedding mere screenshots and links. So what do you think? Do you have any suggestions for improvements? Share them here in the comments or directly on Visualizing.org.

The Visualizing Player is a project of Visualizing.org, a community of creative people working to make sense of complex issues through data and design.

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