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Microsoft Demos "Deep Zoom" Technology

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the more-interested-in-the-image-capture-and-storage dept.

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.

3 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. SeaDragon by Dragonshed · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Re:This is not new... by iang · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. Re:Maybe not CSI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).