Have you heard about Deep Zoom?
No… it is not a porno filmed exclusivly with the Canon 5200mm mirror lens (although that would actually be kind of kinky), it is Microsoft’s new, dangerously named technology for taking huge pictures and making them completely zoomable over the internet through Silverlight.
“How huge?” you may ask. Well, I don’t know if there is a hard limit, but the biggest one I saw was 14 petabytes.
Petabytes. With a “p”.
Basically, take your bedroom, and fill it top to bottom with those nifty little 500GB external back-up hard drives. And you can see any part of that image almost instantly by simply zooming in on the part you want to see.
To see a demo, you can look at the Hard Rock memorabilia page.
Well, with proper thanks to Robby Ingebretsen, Microsoft has released the Deep Zoom Composer, which allows us normal people to make and implement these kinds of super-zooming interfaces.
I’ll be working on it in the coming weeks and I’ll let you know what I come up with.