Presenting Pictures with PicLens
PicLens is a great eye candy tool for web browsers, and can turn any collection of videos and pictures on a site into an engaging, dynamic presentation. It comes in two flavors: the non-browser plugin version and the browser plugin version. It also lets you search for videos and pictures on YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, and more. Weber School District’s own WeberTube has PicLens support built-in (click on “Slideshow”).
If you do not download the browser plugin for either Internet Explorer or Firefox, you will be treated to a slideshow format of your media. It’s pretty, to say the least. But download the plugin and you get an immersive 3d viewing experience.
Use PicLens on your interactive whiteboard when you want to show a video or photo to your students, and watch their eyes and ears perk right up.
[flv]http://www.webertube.com/media/video/188.flv[/flv]
PicLens is awesome!
Piclens has a really elegant look. I’m glad WeberTube supports it. It’s amazing what can be done by good programmers, eh?
Adding PicLens (they renamed it to CoolIris now) to WeberTube was surprisingly simple…I basically just had to add a few tags to the RSS feed that comes through. I do think it’s definitely one of the best free tools out there for visualization, and it’s great that it works with so many sites like Google Images, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, and so on. I’ve found it makes my image searching a lot quicker, since I don’t have to navigate and click through a bunch of pages. I can just zoom around and glance at ALL the images.