Video shows the future of the user interface: Data Visualization

Where is the development direction of the user interface in the future? Microsoft tells us that it is a real-life 3D virtual application, and even another company, Bloom Studio, has similar ideas. According to foreign media reports, Planetary is an iPad app launched this month. It visualizes your music favorites in a "Solar System" way and has amazing visual effects, although it seems a little too fancy at first glance.

The "Solar System" means that a star is a music artist, a planet is an album, and a satellite is an album. You can browse and listen to music as if it were a universe. The app's evaluation on iTunes is "visually appealing, but useless ." This person scores Planetary by 2 stars.

However, this comment did not come up with an idea, because Planetary's cool design shows the potential of data visualization in the New Territories. Whether on your mobile phone or tablet, you will see more and more applications using data visualization (such as provided by Planetary.

Bloom Studio, a San Francisco-based startup company, launched Planetary at the beginning of this month. The company called it "the first in a new visual discovery application" and promised to launch more such applications in the coming months. They plan to use this type of visualization technology, "allowing you to explore and participate in social networks, Video Stream Services, and location-based applications in a completely new way !"

Use information visualization as a new control interface

The difference between Planetary is that it does not rely on traditional software control and design modes (such as playing buttons, scrolling down the list of tracks, or even reading the album cover), but is controlled by data visualization.

Future scholar and writer Bruce Sterling talked about Planetary in a recent interview: "One of the most significant aspects of the software about Bloom is that, it uses information visualization as a new control interface. It is not as simple as renovating the old music machine button. This entire task is being produced in real time. You can run the code on it to play music and use it to create media! This is a major improvement ."

In an interview with wired, Planetary converts a dataset (in this example, music) into a "Tactile and Dynamic Visual Object ". Imagine how this technology can be used in the data of social networks, geographic locations, media, and real-world objects (IOT?

The killer mode of application design"

At the beginning of the release of Planetary, CNET interviewed Ben Cerveny, co-founder of Bloom. He first explained the origins of the company name: "We will make the invisible data tangible. We will make this kind of things become Bloom )."

Ben Cerveny told CNET that if there is better structured data, Bloom's data visualization application will become more powerful: "...... we are also considering metadata from other sources, because the ID3 tag attached to the iTunes track is a little unreliable. More structured data will bring us a lot of possibilities and let us see the constellation of music in countless new ways. "

Ben Cerveny said the tablet brought about a new era of user interfaces and said Bloom could help define a "killer model" designed for an application ".

But the biggest problem is whether Bloom can create anything that is beyond "a seemingly fascinating music application" to truly change the media and social network experience of everyone.

The evaluators who beat 2 stars may be a bit harsh, but he is right. Planetary is actually not that useful. But it clearly shows the future of the user interface, and Bloom is likely to become an industry star.