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