Universe

I know I have been slacking recently on my posting duties. Hopefully I will be able to make up for it a bit this week.

Jonathan Harris’s work has made an appearance on AM before. He is the guy who created WeFeelFine.org. Well, little known fact, he also created the Universe.

The Universe takes full advantage of the concepts behind Web 2.0. It is kind of like a cross between a search engine and an unorganized index, but with an incredible graphic interface. The concept of theUniverse is that it is a night sky filled with constellations. Just as our tradition constellations were formed by what was important to the people who saw them in the sky, the constellations of Harris’s Universe are created by our own mythology today.

Everyone’s path through Universe is different, just as everyone’s path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.

After tinkering around with the Universe it is pretty interesting, though I must admit that none of this description of it truly does it justice. It is one of those things that the more you play around with it the better you understanding of it becomes. I suggest heading over to the site and spend a few minutes playing with it. Though becareful, it can become rather absorbing and before you know it you have lost an hour.