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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.

1 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Installing Silverlight by Dragonshed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.