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Microsoft Demos "Deep Zoom" Technology
Barence writes "Yesterday, during a presentation for this year's Imagine Cup, Microsoft's Mark Taylor demonstrated the company's Deep Zoom technology to appreciative gasps of admiration from the computing students present. It's pretty impressive stuff, and you can try 'deep zooming' for yourself at the Hard Rock Memorabilia Site." Unfortunately the demo requires the Silverlight plugin and the story is pretty thin on technical details. I would be interested to see how they captured the image data to that level without massive pixelation.
My understanding is that you use different resolutions of the photo. The original photo is obviously the highest res you can have, but you can make successively lower res copies. More or less just bring up a a higher res version when the user clicks.
I saw this demoed at the Atlanta Code Camp back in March. Very cool to watch.
Silverlight's MultiScaleImage control (aka deep zoom) is a version of the SeaDragon renderer. The image format it uses is a custom tree structure that contains pixel details relevant to both it's position in the tree and relative to it's peers. Essentially, it's a hierarchical image with very smooth transitions.
Silverlight: silverlight.net
SeaDragon: http://labs.live.com/seadragon.aspx
The Beatles models and signatures pear to be the highest level of detail unless there are other "Easter eggs". That level of zoom on any surrounding areas is pixelated. They have stacked multiple high res photos at various scales in this particular area.
Ian Griffiths implemented a deep zoom for the BBC in their Big Weekend festival. Rather pleasingly they chose to call it the "Big Zoomy Thing" in a nice bit of anti-jargon.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
The folks at CMU have a similar thing:
http://gigapan.org/
It uses a (cheap) commodity digital camera, combined with a smart tripod, good photo stitching software, and a nice Flash UI to give you highly zoomable panoramas. The CMU thing has been around for a while --- over a year at least, plus I'm pretty sure you can get one of the tripod mounts if you participate in the beta and create your own.
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Most people go ooh and aah because they (wrongly) assume that it zooms into normal resolution photos .
It doesnt (because as you and I know, it physically can't).
Deep Zoom does NOT perform CSI/CIA-style photo enhancement. If you dig deeper, you will find that what Deep Zoom is intended for is to enable one to focus on a smaller portion of a giga-pixel photograph so you do not have to download the whole photograph.
Think of it like a hierarchical smooth slicing of a large high resolution photograph and only downloading those "planes" and "sections within a plane" that the user is interested in seeing.
Interesting technology but not magic.
There is two ways to get this level of zoom to work:
1) have the pixels in the first place
2) having more pixels in the first place.
Anything else is a fundamental violation of the laws of physics and math. You simply can not fake what you don't have without it being exactly that: a fake. There is no storage printing technology which could accomplish this level of zooming, and they carefully do not say that this is actually a continuous zoom of a picture on a stamp.
Deep Zoom works by letting you meld several images in such a way as pretend its one image.
Basically, its a con-job of transitioning several different images, where one is a re-photograph of sub portion of the original.
The implication of the article is that this is all one image containing a nearly infinite level of detail, which it most emphatically is NOT.
The author is probably equally impressed by street corner magic tricks.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Typical Slashdot... they post a snarky anti-Microsoft comment with a pretentious air of superiority but get the details wrong.
Photosynth is not Deep Zoomm. Photosynth reconstructs 3D models from collections of 2D photos of the scene acquired from different positions and angles. And as far as I know, Photosynth wasn't an acquisition - it was produced by Microsoft Research.
Deep Zoom was an acquisition, but it was the technology formerly known as Seadragon. It's completely unrelated - Deep Zoom/Seadragon is a 2D thing.
And it's an acquisition, but so what? Ooh, naughty Microsoft - how dare they take exciting technology developed by a startup and put it in the hands of millions of users? Shocking! Clearly it they should have left it to sink in obscurity.
Ian Griffiths
A major difference is the inclusion high resolution collections, which are not fixed at runtime and can be rearranged programmatically. I know this because that is what we did on the Hard Rock Memorabilia project.
Aside from that, it is another form of a "tile server" application... Just one that happens to be rather easy to use from a development perspective, and one that has been done really well (Zoomify/AJAX-based solutions don't hold a candle to the tile stitching and easing effects built into the MultiScaleImage control, IMHO).
Sibelius is a popular music notation software package.
It has become pretty popular in the past 5ish years since its learning curve isn't nearly as steep as its main competitor Finale.
People criticize Sibelius since, typically (at least for the versions I've used), its output isn't exactly professional quality.
It is, however, a great tool for music students.
Back in the day, Finale was the only option for amateur composers to produce professional looking manuscripts.
I'm not sure how far Sibelius has come in the last few years, so things might have changed.
I just pooped your party.
It crashed Firefox 3.0 on my Mac Book after installing the plug in and viewing the demo.
It's the actual software they use on CSI. Read more here.
As I'm reading the descriptions and seeing it on YouTube, I'm thinking I've SEEN something like this before.
And I finally remembered; Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface".
Zooming demo from several years ago that runs in Flash here.
Quite similar, IMHO. Hmm?
"Photosynth incorporates Seadragon's amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities." -http://labs.live.com/photosynth/whatis/seadragon.html With out Sea Dragon, there would be no Photosynth. Oh, and you are a douche.
Sibelius Scorch, which is what Ucklak was probably referring to, is a browser plugin to display music notation. It's basically a DRM-encumbered midi/pdf hybrid. It's used almost on almost all sites selling sheet music, because it can restrict printing and saving.
You can still take screenshots and stitch them back together, but that's obviously a pain in the ass.
The plugin itself tends to be unreliable, it often bombs without delivering the goods, while still counting as a print/view and thus often locking you out of the product you paid for, which then requires much dicking about with the site staff to get it reset.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Works fine with firefox w/vista. Silverlight 2 beta 1, as required by the demo site.
...how they captured the image data to that level without massive pixelation. It's not that impressive. You zoom in extensively and it just gets fuzzy. So big deal: they just interpolate the color values between each pixel "point" instead of drawing huge square pixels.I was much more impressed with PicLens.
Hm, apparently that should have been "Windows browser plugin".
(the Linux stuff is called Moonlight, and isn't functional yet)
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
If you can find them, zoom in on those Beatles bobble heads that the article describes. They're very highly defined. Then zoom out a bit and scroll around to (for example) the surrounding Hard Rock Cafe frame. Wonderfully blurry with respect to the bobble heads.
As you zoom out further, you'll notice how the "container" holding those bobble heads antialiases itself differently from the surrounding different-res artwork.
If you move amongst the different images of guitars and clothes (etc) you'll notice in the lower right that it identifies who the centered item belongs to.
So it appears to me that this is a number of different graphical objects that can be zoomed at relatively different distances at the same time. And it looks like they can be embedded within each other.
/* No Comment */
Amazing how it works on firefox in OSX then.
Photosynth was acquired from the University of Washington... The original was in Java and called photo tourism. http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/
Why not use Rosegarden and Lilypond, fairly easy to use and great professional quality output. Awesome for students since it's you know free =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"...or enhance gritty 320x200 CCTV images into uber-high resolution with no artifacts or fuzziness."
Depending on the footage, this is semi-possible. There's software out there that can watch the motion of an object and determine what the sub pixels were. It's not ideal in every scenario (even less likely slow in the case of a blurry face on a security cam...), and it won't be as snazzy as CSI, but it is possible in a general sense. It only works, though if it can get actual motion vectors from the footage.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The main reason is that most Music School "computer admins" won't want to fudge around with Linux. :)
Yes, I know, Lilypond works in Windows.
You try teaching 120 computer illiterate musicians how to use it
Sibelius is popular because it's relatively easy, and it runs on Windows (so it's relatively easy to install/manage for its user base).
I just pooped your party.
You can watch a Seadragon presentation from TED at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
focus-plus context screens are similar http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/projects/focuspluscontextscreens/index.html
Silverlight 2 has the same capabilities, but noone will use them, because using C# for application/interaction logic is way more productive than using Javascript. Silverlight 2 sites using C# have the following structure Well, the XAML (markup GUI, and what's probably interesting to index) and code are still in different files. A developer can choose to put the XAML outside the
Searchability of XAML is definitely something we're working on, and have guidelines for how to develop apps that are easily searched and index.
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Silverlight 2 Beta was actually released today.
Runtime and SDK downloads and lots of other info about it here http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
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