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.

Comments

No, but I've seen GigaPan

[awtbfb]

I don't watch much TV, but the functionality is awfully similar to GigaPan.

Re:Crashed FF 3.0 on my Mac

[plover]

It consistently crashes Firefox 3.0 RC2 on Vista 64, too, after installing the Silverlight plug-in. I disabled the plug-in and no crashes.

Of course the Silverlight and the zooming works as advertised in IE 7.0.6

Re:WTF?

[Dragonshed]

The earth-shaking innovation is in the form including deep zoom as part of a plugin featuring a fast 2d compositor with video decoding and animation support, common RIA application components and controls using a small .NET Runtime, packaged in a 4.3mb download, "installed in 20 seconds or less", and all of it designed to run on multiple platforms.

MS Devs have done some amazing things within their allotted size quotas. /perspective-and-koolaid

Re:Installing Silverlight

[Dragonshed]

Similar hurdles exist for indexing silverlight content as they exist with flash. Silverlight is mainly for media and data/info visualization.

It's technically possible to index silverlight 1 content, because it's content is "loose Xaml files", which means the site has xml files alongside html/js/etc, that is rendered by the silverlight 1 engine.

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

SomeSite.XAP (zip file containing all code and assets)
- AppManifest.xml
- ApplicationCode.dll (.NET Assembly containing Entrypoint and embedded assets)
- SomeResources/ (compressed folder)
- SomeResources/SomeImage.jpg (...)

AdditionalContent.XAP (supplemental resources and code)
- AppManifest.xml
- SupplementalCode.dll

This makes silverlight 2 apps and content updates really easy to, but are a barrier to extract information.

In both cases the information gained isn't nearly as useful as textual html content, and completely different heuristics would be necessary to analyze the importance of one unit of textual content vs another. Indeed, nearly all the visual cues (The relative position, color, highlights, animations, and reactions to the user) would likely be lost in the process. Perhaps the search engine that can index flash and silverlight content is one that analyzes both visual and textual content.

Re:Imagine Cup

[ozmanjusri]

they just interpolate the color values between each pixel "point" instead of drawing huge square pixels.

It's not a new interpolation algorithm.

It's a live version of the The shift-and-add method or image-stacking technique used by astronomers for decades. It's just that now computer hardware is fast enough do it seamlessly.

Basically, the zoom is made from hundreds of still photographs taken from different vantage points. There was something similar being done with tourist destinations, if I remember correctly.

It's an interesting toy, but the practical applications are limited by the lengthy production process.