Glassbrush

Images brought to life

Nice picture. But I wonder what that little planet is on the far right? Is there a way to find out?

Imagine if you could not only look at photos and images, but find out more about the objects and people within them. Glassbrush takes the concept of tagging images to a new level of sophistication by adding meaning and context to a visual scene and linking people and things together. By combining elements of traditional web pages, visual media and computer games, we have developed a qualitatively different online experience - one that appeals to the eye and is accessible to all.

The Glassbrush browsing platform is currently under development and is scheduled for alpha release in late 2011.

3D building modeller

Building design for everyone

Collada files, baked textures, polygons and matrix algebra ... computer aided design and modelling is a fascinating industry, but not one that is accessible to the non-specialist. Our latest client project changes all that by bringing the power of 3D building design to anyone, right within their web browser. By choosing from a library of standard components, users will quickly and easily build and customize real building designs. And once the model is finished, they can print out building plans or export their model as an industry standard data file to take it to a design specialist.

The 3D Building Modeller is being developed using Papervision3D and Drupal frameworks for release in late 2011.

Symbolyze

Text free web browsing

How can you use the Internet if you can't read?

Unfortunately, the answer is that you probably can't. Even though hundreds of millions of new web users are coming online in the developing world, the prevailing user interfaces on the World Wide Web are built mostly for those literate in English - effectively shutting out two-thirds of the world's potential users.

Symmetri does ongoing research exploring new ways of interfacing with the web that rely as little as possible on the ability to read text. Our prototype application Symbolyze is a simple, text free interface that allows users to search for content using symbols alone.

Try symbolyze prototype or download the project summary

Charting suite

Advanced data visualization in the browser

Delivering data in a way that is useful for people is one of the central problems in information technology today. When we were engaged by our data-rich client to replace their existing Excel chart package, we realized that designing a new interface within the browser was the best way to get their analytics out to their users.

Built on top of proprietary interfaces to a huge data warehouse, the charting application developed by Symmetri makes extensive use of the Adobe Flex data visualization libraries. And because the library framework is open source, we were able to extend existing code to add a number of special features and interactivity to the standard charts.

The charting suite is now released from 2011 for a global user base.

Search-cube

Interactive visual search

Search results in a cube? Why? We're not really sure. But people seem to like it.

Search-cube was designed as an experiment, not a real world tool, but it has proved to be popular with educators and artists. It provides a new spin on visual search by displaying web search results on a unique, 3D cube interface that is visually rich, aesthetic and fun to use. The mashup is powered by the Google Search API and Thumbshots. This is not the most practical of search engines, but it sure is something different.

'Searching never was this much fun!' - www.hypedworld.com

Try search-cube