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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.
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
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).
It crashed Firefox 3.0 on my Mac Book after installing the plug in and viewing the demo.
Photosynth was acquired from the University of Washington... The original was in Java and called photo tourism. http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/