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Spectra is a visual news reader from MSNBC focused in their feed content. It provides a very interactive design and viewing experience while providing comprehensive live news coverage. It is designed to bring a "Fuller Spectrum" of news to life in their most immersive extension yet.
Immersive, it is. But productivity does seem to take a back seat with the visualizations they’ve chosen. The feeds are either viewed in constant orbital mode which does provide an over view of almost all the channels. The other one is a new concept, Color Sensor view. It utilizes your webcam to provide "Human interaction", which isn’t really anything more then it sensing the colors from the camera and changing the background to provide you with a psychedelic feeling ( which has proved to be quite laggy as well ). Another issue is that, to read the complete stories, it launches another window to open the link which just beats the concept of a news reader, which should be really aggregating the news, not just providing links and snippets to them ( like Google Reader, or the feed readers in popular web browsers today ).
It is an interesting concept, and the productivity isn’t really anything to talk about. WPF based readers from New York Times and other websites provide a far better experience. Although this could prove to be a nice UI for touch sensitive computer devices. But until then, it’s another Flash based concept.
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