msnbc's newsware

[Kevin Dugan]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23781733/

MSNBC's Newsware is a pretty cool lab online with a visual newsreader (pic attached) and amongst other things some news games.

Building on Brad's alternate reality games that help collect the news, NewsWare's "news-infused games" serve up the news in a gaming environment. It would seem to offer a natural revenue stream and studies show that ads in games are, for the next five minutes, accepted by users.

Anyway, it's an interesting site.

[Brad King]

We've been tinkering around with a 3D visual for a news site. A really innovative company will crack the design code on this and start thinking of the web as "a web" and not as a "page".

[Kevin Dugan]

Yeah, the ones I've seen so far do not take the concept very far. The visual newsreader for example would be better if I could control the content more...not unlike Minority Report oddly enough.

[Brad King]

That's the stuff I saw when I was doing my fellowship at the Ball State Center for Media Design. Ironically, it was being done with game sites at Microsoft.

The question: if you aren't trying to make money off banners, what's the best way to display information?

On the web, the answer is with 3D interfaces because you can get so much more information on one screen. But we don't have the input devices -- a cool mouse for instance -- that make that doable yet.

The mouse is an awful input device. So is the touchpad.