Zoom is the new click
Deepzoom is an initiative by Microsoft that allows us to zoom almost arbitrary large images using the Silverlight platform. Deepzoom uses a blurry-to-sharp loading experience to display very large images without affecting the performance of the application in which the image is displayed.
It uses an image pyramid structure to form the deepzoom image. This is basically a large amount of photos that are merged together to form the large zoom-able image. The image pyramid tiles the image into 256×256 pixel tiles of JPG or PNG images so the image is not seen as a whole but rater a compilation of tiles. This helps to load the image almost immediately.
The image pyramid
The mouse wheel can be used to zoom in or out of an image and it is possible to move around the image by dragging. The Hard Rock Cafe website took full advantage of this technology.
It’s a great example of how to navigate solely by zooming. Could this be the new trend in website navigation?
Cool feature – but the new trend in website navigation? I doubt it!
Perhaps not in this stage of the web , but possibly the future. Interesting read
I was chatting to someone at tech-ed 2008 who had first hand experiance on this, his words not for web, and if you ever in the market for this, have lots of hard drive space!
Very cool tool for marketing and product promos, more for landing pages i would say.
l