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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.
When I read Imagine Cup, I did a double take. Back in the 90s, Impulse, the company that made the popular 3D software Imagine, had a program called "Imagine CUP", which stood for Imagine Constant Upgrade Program. It allowed users to pay for the upgrade to Imagine up front and they could receive all the minor versions inbetween the major versions.
So is this digital zoom stuff like the software that they "download off the internet in CSI: Miami" *Snicker*
didn't I see this in CSI ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
seen CSI? This technology is so passe.
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.
They do this all the time on CSI.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would be interested to see how they captured the image data to that level without massive pixelation.
... you don't actually think that the image data came from one photo ... do you?
You don't
*slaps forehead*
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Unfortunately the demo requires the Silverlight plugin...
A Microsoft tech demo requires the installation of new Microsoft software to view? Who would have though?
While Silverlight might never be as widely-supported as Flash, I hope that perhaps the competition might force Adobe to do something about the CPU hog that is Flash.
But how is this different different from google maps (or live maps, or WHATEVER allows you to zoom out a lot)..
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
The article, the pictures... it all seems to be too good to be true. Here's one of many of my problems with this: The stamp. Is this supposed to be real? It certainly looks fake. Zooming is nothing new, and I'm sure that if I took a hi-rez pic, and squeezed it into a part of another hi-rez pic, it would be cool to zoom out of too. Now, the fact they squeezed that much data into an file for viewing on the interwebs is impressive, but I still hate Silverlight. Perhaps they can do that with some useful stuff, like footage from the JFK assassination... perhaps we can look at a reflection in glass and see that it's no Lee Harvey Oswald but actually "Cancer Man"!
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
What is Sibelus?
Typical Microsoft.. they bought out a company that created the technology. It's called Microsoft Photosynth and this video explains how they do it... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEcHcRqxmj4
OK, I'm a big enough person to admit it: I have no idea what Sibelus is. Regardless, I'm wondering about whether to install Silverlight. I'm on an Intel-Mac and in general have found that I've had little use for MS-specific plug-ins. Any other Mac folks found a legitimate reason to install Silverlight? Or is it all eye candy stuff right now?
Bark less. Wag more.
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.
AFAIK, a Finnish classical music composer.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
There next product for stealing your checkbook while Windows does a colonoscopy
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Super Troopers? I hope Decker shoves a unicorn horn up your ass.
I admit the demo is neat and all, but they are not really zooming into the same image. They have just developed a way to quickly load the high resolution image on the fly. Kind of like how Google Maps will deliver a higher res map when you zoom in; but this is happening much faster.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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The idea pre-dates CSI. Does anyone remember the movie "Powers of Ten" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten) I remember watching this in science class in middle school and being pretty impressed.
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.
You may find reason to install it when it reaches RTM and companies start using it for production work. Right now it's beta1 (beta2 is going to be released sometime in the next couple weeks), and it's mostly for customers/developers wanting to experiment with it.
What becomes of silverlight content, whether it's all eye candy or not, is anyones guess. What I can say is, developing for Silverlight 2 kicks ass.
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.
Well, except for the embrace step. And the extending.
Come to think of it, I think Apple extinguished pre-Intel Macs all on their own.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I know who Jean Sibelius was, but Ucklak was talking about some "Sibelus" software. "Sibelius" is a well-known music notation package. There might be a plugin you need to install to view score sheets created with it. Well, I was just pissed off a little bit by someone complaining about a piece of software they don't even know how to spell. I must admit that my post wasn't worth more than the original troll. Sorry.
Don't we already have the ability to process multi-resolution images in, for example, Google Maps? You know, zooming in and out images with large total resolution?
It would be impressive if the photo they demonstrated on was anything but a photoshop, but given that the 428x134 signature is 52x11 in the 350x237 statuette picture which is 29x26 in the 428x350 hard rock picture which is 87x87 in the 428x399 stamp picture, for the stamp to be real would require a 33 gigapixel stamp (which, at 1 inch square, would be printed at 33,000,000,000 DPI).
To me zooming in and displaying a different image isn't really as exciting at the article author makes it sound? Maybe I'm missing something because the journalist sounds pretty damn excited about it.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
But the viewer is 126G.
I'm far more interested in the tech that allowed them to change the camera angle of the photographs in Bladerunner. When's that coming?
End of line..
"The Silverlight plugin does not work on pre-Intel Macs. Sorry."
embrace, extend, extinguish.
You're absolutely right - especially when you contrast with the way Apple supports their own pre-Intel computers.
I was at the event as an Imagine Cup finalist, and the technology on display was very impressive. The Deep Zoom application was demoed as from the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia site, and looked very fun to play with indeed. The zoomed-in bits were very impressive. My live blog of the day: http://www.chris-alexander.co.uk/?post=19
Ferret
http://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/download/get.pl?com=sh&prod=scorch
It's a plugin required by some sites to download sheet music or to view the first page before you buy it.
It's a major pain in the ass, it worked the first time I used it then upgrades didn't work and so on and so forth. I'm at the point where I don't care.
It's easier to find sheet music for free than it is to purchase it.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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.
There is pink dress near the bottom right corner. The legend says it was worn by Britney Spears. On top of the dress is a photo of Britney Spears wearing the dress.
I zoomed all the way in hoping that I could see Britney wearing that dress. Of course, it's too low rez and you can't even tell it's Britney.
DeepZoom is not that deep after all. I would have let out an "ahhh" if I could have seen Britney.
It's either music notation software, or the Governor of Kansas.
I'm guessing the first one.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Are people forgetting that "Microsoft doesn't innovate"?
OOOOOOOh, it's requires Silverlight. I'm not going to waste 10 seconds installing that!
Oh come now, that's not "revolutionary". Why not?
Because this is basically a very simple technology of stacked images. In fact, it is not much more than a proper implementation of a scaling algorithm plus intelligent preloading/guessing of "the data we will need next".
No black magic in there, no "how the frell did they do THAT". For me.
I felt pretty frelled when I got a first glimpse of google maps. That was "revolutionary" stuff. Or Quake I, for that matter. Years earlier, Wolfenstein 3D. Or the Wii-mote.
Fast deep image navigation? w00t.
Surface, that's a neat idea. Wait until they cripple it with DRM and stuff, but it's a neat idea in the first place.
It crashed Firefox 3.0 on my Mac Book after installing the plug in and viewing the demo.
are there others reading /. that are thinking.. Yawn, wake me when it's working like Google maps only much better?
I realize that it's new, and takes effort, but I can't break out the oohs and aaahhhs just yet. No matter how good it is, is it worth upgrading for?
Car analogy: Isn't this like demonstrating a concept car that they intend to put into production, but production will be a little bit different?
I'll wait for SP2 (or equivalent), thanks very much.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Go to Pouet and you'll find many demonstrations of this effect.
jdb2
See Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten. Now that's a zoom.
As for doing it in real time, Keyhole (bought by Google and renamed Google Earth) was doing this on PCs five years ago. Any decent GPU can do this today, and you can download Google Earth to see it.
I saw one of the first systems able to do this in real time about 25 years ago. It was inside a classified tank at a major aerospace firm, and required a rack of special-purpose hardware. The user interface was beautifully simple - a big trackball (for pan), a lever (for zoom), and a knob (for rotation).
Even Microsoft's little film isn't original. That technique has been used a few times in commercials.
So Silverlight doing this isn't exactly a big "wow" development.
KEWL! now they can spot bugs from a mile away!!!
Thank you.
People need to see Blade Runner.
(Especially people who love Ghost in the Shell...)
There is Moonlight for Linux and as there are ports of Linux for PowerPC CPUs and Moonlight is open source, you would only have to upgrade your OS.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Lol you have to be kidding. Non-Intel macs are dead, they are not being supported by a wide range of vendors, including their creator, Apple. Per Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.5
"Leopard drops support for slower G4 and all G3 processors".
It's just a matter of time.
So they have pictures.
And if you zoom in, it loads the higher quality pics.
If you zoom out, it loads the lower quality pics.
That's nice and all, but it doesn't deserve it's own Web 2.0 style name. Sure, it does it quickly, but for all I know the damned thing could just be loading progressive jpegs in the background. Not exactly rocket science. Maybe add some logic to make it load stuff near the center of your view first. It's not magic, it shouldn't require silverlight, and I really don't care about it.
I don't watch much TV, but the functionality is awfully similar to GigaPan.
I would like to see Silverlight content able to be indexed on search engines...that is one HUGE disadvantage that Flash has...it would really help push this product with web developers. Otherwise you have to create two versions of the site, one for search engines and one for users...though I think 100% flash sites are stupid...but people use them, and like I said it could help Microsoft boost it's market share quite substantially. Silverlight does look pretty impressive...
They opened Flash so you can write your own interpreter. I guess they're hoping someone else will make it less of a CPU hog.
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?
erm, is it just me, or is this just mipmapping? hell isn't google maps and the variants just the ultimate 'deep zoom'? i really fail to see how this is something new.
So let me get this straight. You're saying they didn't stack a ton of memorabilia in a pile and take a picture of it?
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
So I followed the link to http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ - even installed the Silverlight plugin, against my best judgment just to check out this "new and exciting" technology... and it just looks like fairly high rez images. While that's all fine and dandy... it's nothing spectacular to me.
/rant
Not to mention, when I went from http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ to http://www.slashdot.org/ Firefox crashed. Way to go MS. Thanks for reaffirming my feelings about how fscking horrible every piece of software that comes out of your company is.
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
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
Fotomagico photo zoom transition, notice the video demo at the top of the page: http://www.boinx.com/fotomagico/overview/storytelling/
The real trick is finding an image with boring enough edges that you can pretend it came from the other. You'll notice on the Microsoft image demos they mostly have solid color edges except for the Planet Hollywood picture which is followed by something so busy you can't really tell where it fits in.
I got the program at least 2 years ago with one of those $50 software bundles where you save $10 on one program you really wanted and get 4 free ones thrown in. The program is cool and all but as others have said it's just a digital magic trick. I just wanted to document this prior art incase Microsoft tries to patent it.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Thank you.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Can someone hurry up and write a Silverlight interpreter inside of a Flash control?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
This is hardly new technology. Isn't 'deep zooming' what I've been brought up to know as... well... 'zooming'?
I believe there was a demo, around a year ago, that Steve Jobs did at WWDC to demonstrate how Mac OS X had new 64-bit exploitation abilities in Leopard. If I remember correctly, he brought up two copies of the same image, to do a 'race' (32-bit vs. 64-bit). It was a wide shot of a chamber in the Library of Congress, and it was sufficiently detailed that one could zoom in and read the labels on the spines.
Now, with this, Jobs was demonstrating that the technology to zoom in to such hi-res images has been around for ages. It's hardly new technology.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I've got the 1.42 GHz PPC Mini, and Leopard has been great, and with 10.5.3 it got even better when they fixed a graphics issue.
If Microsoft and some websites don't want viewers, fine. Their loss.
I think it's reasonable to only support the current and previous version of an OS. Microsoft, Red Hat and others all have that model (usually).
Oh well, c'est la vie.
My mom says I'm cool.
On a slightly divergent note, what is "unfortunate" about Silverlight? I would have assumed that any invention that gets rid of the plague named "flash" would be welcome to the Slashdot crowd? Even something from Microsoft. Although, unfortunately I was using Safari on a Mac, Silverlight downloaded and installed automatically without a hitch. Much better than most Mac applications where I have to spend time in first minimizing the browser, resizing the downloads window, openning the Mac HD folder, openning the applications folder and then "carefully" dragging and dropping the new software to the applications folder. Only to find out later that the application was dropped somewhere else. I'm a new Mac user and I'm sure the Mac fanboys would point out the flaw in my method, but then, isn't the Mac just supposed to WORK? Yeah right!
It's a bunch of photos that were photoshopped to look like it's zooming out -_-. Even the article says so. This is nothing fascinating, you could probably do it in Flash.
Enhance...ENHANCE! ENHANCE!!!
Anybody else catch the thank-you letter from Paul McCartney to a cop who served as his bodyguard in Miami (it's a little more than halfway down on the left side)? Four pages! How cool is that?
I have FF 2.0.0.14 and all I get is a black screen at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I saw a video of this demo from TED2007 when it was called Photosynth, formerly Seadragon. Would it have killed Microsoft to have kept either of these much cooler names? I don't know which clueless marketing droid came up with this incredibly lame moniker, but he should be strapped into one of Ballmer's chairs when Uncle Fester is having his daily rant against Google/Apple/Linux.
Doesn't the next id technology used for the game Rage do this on any surface?
Setting up a single canned demo is pretty easy to do - relative to applying this "technology" in a wider automated scale.
Sure it is cool to watch, but so is any special effect.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
WTF, Apple supports non-intel Macs. Read 5 lines up on the wikipedia site you reference: "Processor must be any Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 (at least 867 MHz or faster)" I have no problem on my G5 with apple software. It's M$ who decided not to support non-intel macs.
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Purely theoretically speaking, it is possible to make a camera which captures a 3d surface.
An image sensor in a camera is made up of Light dependent transiters which biasness changes depending on light exposure (magnified by a lens of course). Now add a laser distance measurer along with each pixel (crazy idea, I know) which would enable you not only to capture the color of each pixel but also its distance. This will record a 3d image which would be, using two of more sensors, walked around like in bladerunner.
Here's a 1.5 Gigapixel mega photo of Machu Picchu
this seems to do the same thing as zoomify only with a smoother interface, wake me up when they have a version I can put my own photos in, preferably for free (and preferably not using silverlight)
Blazing Spiders
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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.
So... it's just like Google Earth?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Yes, in fact it was. By Microsoft.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
So, I fired up IE and tried to look at the demo. Of course, first it demands that I install the latest version of silverlight. After the installation, I can't see the demo because I'm above the desired version.
installed version 2.0.30523
requested version 2.0.30226
What a P.O.S.!
That's pretty neat.
Of course, Google Maps can zoom smoothly from earth orbit down to my house without downloading a technology that crashes my browser 4 times in two minutes. (More than doubled my total number of browser crashes).
But this is impressive guys. You can hardly see the pixilation until you get kinda close. It's almost as good as if those had all been separate high resolution photos with a thumbnail page.
Almost--but keep up the good work guys! Soon you may be as good as basic HTML, and who knows, in a few years you could even rival AJAX.
According to a story posted on /. earlier today, the next version of OS X abandons the pre-Intel Macs, FYI.
I installed silverlight 2 beta from the download linked from the site and this is what it gives me:
installed version 2.0.30523.6
requested version 2.0.30226
So the problem is that I have a *newer* version of silverlight? Or are the version strings getting mangled during comparison?
I have firefox 3. Is anyone else running into this problem?
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.
If you zoom in enough on the Goatse Guy photo, you can actually see the light shining through from the other end.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
Any mapping application uses this same tech. They just swapped a photo for a map.
Silverlight sucks, it doesn't even support my cpu, not that I would want to install it anyway. I have an old Athlon from just before they released the Atlon XP with SSE.
what sig?
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.
My video compression blog
Silverlight 2 Beta was actually released today.
Runtime and SDK downloads and lots of other info about it here http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
My video compression blog
I spent a good 10 minutes on there, before finding the one with the woman with the naked boobs. This technology would be a great way to hide your porn.
That must be true then
-FL
Actually, what the author really meant was "Unfortunately it requires you to take 40,000 photos of a postcard with a $10,000 dollar camera." Outside of that tiny little consideration, its almost as neat as Quartz, but you need Silverlight installed.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Yes, install silverlight to see this amazing coolness, but Linux is not invited to the party.
Instead, Linux has to play cat and mouse with homebrew mono and moonlight hacks.
It's amazing how cool Microsoft tries to be when they want you to turn your back on Linux.
So what?
... this technology just reuse old stuff and tell us that with Silverthing you will be able to use this wonderful technology...
... you can do that too.
I don't understand why this is so... new technology... so breath taking
Google Earth, Mandelbrot fractals,
In Java, Javascript, flash,
So, what...?
Sorry Mate
....all sounds pretty shifty really. (^-^) anyway, maybe next time.
The website didn't work for me. It just popped up a box asking me to install some program.....
thx e
Apple themselves don't support PPC Macs fully anymore. Try to run the iPhone SDK on a G5 some time.
These are pictures in pictures, which provides the "resolution". Even in the demo, you can see that the image of the stamp is too perfect to be on that envelope. And then the inset of the Beatles memorabilia is superimposed on the image of the HRC. And then the image of the dolls is superimposed on that image. So you are zooming in to successive images, not zooming in on a single true image and "magically" getting higher resolution like an episode of C.S.I.
I don't see the same features on any other part of the demo image.
I don't see what's so novel about it.
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
As I am on OS X and Silverlight beta 2.x doesn't exist for PPC (while Flash 10 beta exists), I couldn't check the marvellous demo.
What I know is, Zoomify exists for years starting as a cross-platform Quicktime codec and later a Flash program. In fact, it is free to implement your sites which will run anywhere with Flash installed. (I did)
http://www.zoomify.com/
MS should be busy compiling their Beta for OS X/PPC since people already started to say they are a bit early for their "lag those non windows punks releases" tactic.
2 GNUs 1 cup?
Only works on Silverlight and the license has this to say ..
'INDEMNIFICATION. You agree to indemnify, hold harmless, and defend Microsoft from and against any claims, allegations, lawsuits, losses and costs (including attorney fees), that arise or result the use or deployment of your "Silverlight applications"'
davecb5620@gmail.com
I haven't had a chance to play around with Microsoft's "Deep Zoom" thing or Photosynth because I doubt either would work that well on my Powerbook G4 even if it was supported on pre-Intel Macs. But, Panoramio just released something called "look around" that does work on my computer. Google talks about it on its LatLong blog. In a way it reminds me of the Photosynth demo.
This sure looks like Deep Zoom and it works without Silverlight ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
I can't see, what I get is this msg:
"The site that you visited was built for an earlier, beta version of Silverlight - not the current one. Please contact the site owner to let them know"
davecb5620@gmail.com
I think I'll have to check again when the site is flash compatible.
Privacy is terrorism.