Toluu

A Deep Zoom Blog

Tales of Deep Zoom, creating interesting apps in Silverlight with Deep Zoom, cool new ways to present information

Seadragon AJAX and Deep ZoomNovember 23

It's been a while since my last post, but that's because I've been also helping out with the Seadragon AJAX release. You have to check out what we did there. You can now browse single images in web browsers where Silverlight is either not supported or not installed.

Check out Seadragon AJAX in action:

 

The picture above is actually my own bike. I did this as an example of a sparse image, a technology I am saving for a later post. The above image is actually roughy 1 terra pixel in size. Of course it doesn't have that kind of resolution in every spot, in fact it's really only one terra pixel in the spot where the the image gallery spirals off into seemingly infinity.

Now look below at deep zoom:

 

 

So how does this all work, and what's the difference?

If you look at the AJAX version you'll notice a few things. For one, it's much slower (i.e. lower framerate than the deep zoom version). It's not as buttery smooth as deep zoom. The reason for that is the way browser renders images: it's just not that fast. Then, on top of it, there is a ton of blending between the various levels of detail, and all of that has to be done in the browser's DOM. It's not really what the browser was designed to do.

In Silverlight on the other hand, we've had the chance to improve the software rasterizer - the deep zoom rendering not only takes advantage of the ultra

Powerlaw scaling of synchronized content with Deep ZoomNovember 3

Well, I also updated this app now that Silverlight 2 has RTW'ed. The performance improvements we've made in Silverlight are truly stunning. I will reserve the details for a later blog post, but one of the things that deep zoom always does is blend the various levels of detail as they become available over the network. Now if you use Virtual Earth data, as it is the case in the example below, well when you zoom in really fast and the network isn't as fast as you are with the mousewheel, then you may end up having to blend a lot of levels of detail.

Needless to say, even if we have to blend 8 or more layers at the same time, our performance does not drop anymore. We keep up a very high framerate and that's definitely a great thing!

 

As usual, you can get the Source code here.

Photosynth Silverlight Viewer Updated to Silverlight 2 RTMOctober 28

Wow, it's been a couple of weeks since I posted last. I was actually over in Germany for Photokina 2008, one of the largest conferences for imaging in the world. It was held in beautiful Cologne, Germany. I showed Photosynth to the awed crowds, it was a fantastic experience being at such a large consumer focused conference showing off Microsoft technology and actually getting ooh's and aaah's.

I guess I got to go because the intersection of folks who worked on Deep Zoom, Photosynth, and who speak German is one person. That's me.

Anyway since then Silverlight has RTM'ed and I had to wait for Streaming to updated, which it has been now so go ahead and check out Photosynth again:

Source is now also available here.

Photosynth is Hiring!September 11

I just got an e-mail from Scott saying that the Photosynth team is looking for people. Well, I figure people who have landed here are folks who may be interested. You know and care about Silverlight and Photosynth, looks like you may be in the right corner!

Anyway, take a look at the job postings here. Enjoy!

Showing Photosynth Collections in Silverlight (2-D)September 3

If you haven’t already, check out Photosynth, the latest release from Livelabs showing off this fantastic technology that stitches images together in 3-D space and lets you navigate your vacation photos. It's better seen than described in words, so don't hesitate to blow off a few minutes looking at the great Synths that have already come in from all over the world.

Well, the wonderful thing about Photosynth and Deep Zoom is that we share the same file format. A collection created in Photosynth can be opened in Deep Zoom and the items in the collection can be arranged to a developer’s liking.

Click below to see the application that lets you view any photosynth collection you may have found and liked, but don’t have a chance to look at because you are using a Mac (like me at home) or because you don’t have a supported browser.

 

How does one open a Photosynth collection?

Well, search for your favorite Photosynth, right click the link and copy it, or copy the URL from the address bar, and paste it into the viewer. The viewer does the rest to open the collection and lay it