We make visualizers. We have only begun to scratch the surface. There is so much here. It was a medium who had a lost decade. Everyone forgot about them. Well, in terms of music visualization, anyway. Data visualization has been thriving. We believe in both. We believe there is a lot going on here.

How do we explain this… let’s see. Okay. Let’s take this angle. Jakob Neilsen said ““The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling
medium; it’s a buying medium. It’s user-controlled, so the user controls the user experiences.” We have always ranted and raved about the internet being a two way conversation, right? You talk, users talk back.

What is a visualizer? A visualizer is the visual representation of data. That data can be sound – as in a music visualizer, or it can be, say, number of complaints responded to, number of locations of a restaurant chain, or number of unhealthy snacks we have gotten off the streets. Looked through this prism, the potential value of a visualizer, as a visual reresentation of a two way conversation, the power becomes clear. You can see, right there, in black and white, that something’s happening. And not just in black and white, but in color, and 3D, and in real time, vivid movement. Transparency and information as marketing.

Then there’s the interactive side of it. A visualizer can be user-controlled. The user can tweak the parameters, and parse the data in a way that’s most relevant to them. This has ramifications not just in two-way marketing and transparency, as above, but in entertainment.

What have we been railing about constantly when it comes to marketing on the web? That it needs to be interactive. That it’s two way. That the user has control. What’s our pet peeve about online video? It’s not two way. It’s one way. You are making a sequence of images and showing them to the user in a single order. We’ve seen some ways that this can be expanded upon for interactivity in some of our interactive video work like the Subservient Chicken, Method Come Clean, Samsung Anyfilms and the Motorazr project. But what if the actual frames were generated dynamically based on user input, not just which frames? Then you’re talking about a visualizer. Andrew Bell had been experimenting with this generative work in some of his traditional video work at Method Studios prior to joining The Barbarian Group, and you can see some on his personal blog. And this is where Robert has been treading for a year now. One visit to his site will start to show you the boundless untapped potential in this area. This is Marketing R&D discoveries, ripe for the harnessing for commercial benefit. The time is nigh.