At its essence, Flickr Gettr is a novel virtual interface bridging the virtual worlds to the wealth of shared real life imagery and information in Flickr.
Currently on Display at the New Media Consortium, amongst others: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Campus%20West/137/100/21
USAGE
Participants query to search public image folders at Flickr web-service. Queries pulls related images from Flickr and feeds them back to be spatialized in an immersive visual and sonic environment. As each image spawns, it generates a chime-like sound which parallels the environment of imagery that surrounds the viewer.
In Flickr Gettr II, a participant can touch any image and receive a list of the tags associated with it. Touching the same image again initiates a random search for one of those tags thus retrieving similar imagery.
In Flickr Gettr, an external web service was used as an intermediary to query Flickr, receive images and format them for delivery as a texture. It then passed the aspect ratios and tags in a second query to be able to map the textures properly. To make these interactions more flexible, the intermediary web server was employed to collate and prepare information to retain states that can be queried from external applications. The web application effectively serves as an intermediary between the virtual world and outside environments, providing the communications link and logic to assimilate the information. This can make the creation of Web 2.0 mash-ups much simpler as the code for doing these sorts of queries and logic is already highly developed in Java, Ruby, and Perl for example. Flickr Gettr also triggered music files upon the rapid rezzing of objects to create a cumulative ambient effect.