Deep Zoom: Microsoft’s Take on Bringing Zooming to the Web
Yesterday, Microsoft announced Silverlight Beta 2 at MIX08 which features a technology called Deep Zoom. Deep Zoom seems to stem from Microsoft research project called SeaDragon which I mentioned in the footnote of my post on Zoomable User Interfaces.
Deep Zoom is simply another way of bringing the zooming metaphor to the web, although, I admit, a quite impressive one. However, when I tried it out with my laptop running on battery it felt a little sluggish. I am sure performance will be better when Silverlight 2.0 is released.
Go and check out Deep Zoom for yourself in this impressive demonstration on the Hard Rock Memorabilia site.</p>
Besides that, Microsoft released a preview of Deep Zoom Composer, a tool for developers to publish galleries with Deep Zoom support.
After all, I think it's time we bring this kind of zooming to the Flash Platform. I am working on it. Stay tuned.