Welcome another high-end information design visualizer in the form of Virgin Eye, Richard Branson and company’s aggregator-slash-tracker-slash-gallery. It provides sweet eye candy and is functionally simple enough, though I’m not sure why the gallery is there. Its inclusion seems like an afterthought, melded on top of the experience, rather than integrated into it.

Performance-wise, it seems to be chugging along over my high-speed network and isn’t as responsive as I’d like. Perhaps that’s due to initial traffic hits. Otherwise, for a visualizer, it’s not bad, but it’s lack of features and additional views makes it a quick visit.

via Josh Spear

Disclaimer: The schedule has been hectic, so I’m a little behind here.

Started off Sunday in “Responsible Web Design,” but it felt like a dry run of Adobe feature sets through the web space. Making a safe exit, I headed over to “Meet the Architects,” which was essentially my first choice anyway, since I’ve been a fan of architecture since I was 7 years old.

The panel was mid-stream when I entered, talking about how architecture relates to digital media through a variety of ways. From using tools like Flickr to creating elaborate 3D fly-throughs targeted for wide, public consumption. Although, this panel seemed out of place for SXSW, it was quite fitting as it fundamentally poses the question to the audience of how to apply their skills to any discipline. While I couldn’t immediately make the connection from architecture to what I do, it became clear that there is a heavy reliance on digital media artists to help support a virtually unlimited array of arts, crafts and sciences. This was one of the better panels at SXSW.

Data as Art was another winner with digital media visualists Peter Kirn and Joy Mountford. Most stunning were the displays of data served up in a pastiche of ways. A continuously updating “live” data stream of Yahoo Mail was captivating as it showed the traffic on a global scale in it’s purest form, a rotating image of a gleaming, white globe with blue towers rising up and down as time zones and the hours spun by.