Readers of my site in the digital media realm will note my fascination with dynamic visualizations, in particular Robert Hodgin’s work. Hodgin built a wonderful iTunes visualizer called Magnetosphere a while back - which mysteriously disappeared from his site a few months back. I wrote him, and he said* that it had been sold to a third party.

There’s strong evidence that this third party is in fact Apple, and that it may ship with iTunes 8, which could be shown as soon as next week at an iPod Event. Read on for multiple updates to the story…

A friend tipped me off to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg & Pownce, twittering this on Sept. 2nd:

the new iTunes 8.0 visualizations are really trippy - there is one with planet like objects wrapping around each other w/stars/light streams

That sounds exactly like Magnetosphere. Check out the page, and here’s a video that I’ve captured of its output. Rose wrote more about the other iTunes rumors on his blog.

Update: I’ve been blown away by the coverage of my hunch, which has now been confirmed by Kevin Rose. Lots of sites picked it up, which was fun to see. I wish Robert the best, and hope he got a good deal out of the bargain.

* I was incorrect that this correspondence was with Robert; it was someone else at the company. Legal disclaimer: I didn’t reveal any info on that issue (other than it was sold, which was on their site) until after Kevin Rose broke the story (my contact asked for discretion). Nothing to see here Steve, move along…

Update 2: iTunes 8 has now been released; what was Magnetosphere has been extended and improved in some interesting new ways. Here’s a few screenshots:

Posted in Film & Video