MSN has put together a fun little celebrity tattoo browser using Deep Zoom. Lots of nice UI details, like how the photos rotate as you drag them around, and bounce off the walls if you throw them. I also like the way the filtering works: the selected photos move to the center and the remaining ones are scattered around the edges. My only complaint is the discontinuity between the photo selection mode and the photo zooming mode.
There’s a lot of interest in zooming these days, lots of different projects and experiments around the world, but the community still feels really scattered. In the hopes of creating a space where we can all come together, exchange ideas, and collaborate, I’ve started a zooming group on GROU.PS. Check it out, add some info, let me know what you think!
I’ve been a fan of Scott McCloud since Understanding Comics. In his follow-up, Reinventing Comics, he proposes that the web could finally break comics out of their paper cage, allowing them to grow in whatever direction best fits them. He called this notion the infinite canvas, and even went so far as to discuss some of the technological ramifications that underlie Seadragon (and other similar zooming systems) today.
So, for the most recent Live Labs Out of the Box Week, I built a comic creator/viewer and called it Infinite Canvas. It’s all JavaScript (not Seadragon Ajax, but similar), even on the server side, where I’m using AppJet. Some early adopters have already created comics in it, so come check it out, and tell your comic friends about it!
More generally, it’s also an exploration into how we create and consume content in a zooming world. I look forward to continuing to explore these ideas in this and other domains.
UPDATE: The AppJet link no longer works. Please use
http://infinitecanvas.jgate.de/
instead.
This isn’t new, but I figure now’s a good time to post it. The folks at Vertigo grabbed all the newspaper front pages from the day after Obama won the election and put them together as a Deep Zoom Collection.
Scott Hanselman talks about how he did it in this post.
Bio-bak is an amazing zooming/panning artwork/game/portfolio/thing with a bizarre sense of humor. If you’re not offended by crude language and imagery, I highly recommend checking it out; lots of good food for thought in terms of zooming interface, storytelling and design.
Lovepixel Zoom takes the extremely large pixel-art city, LOVEPIXEL, and lets you explore it with Seadragon Ajax. The original was already a fabulous treasure hunt of little scenes, and it’s fun to explore it in this new form (especially in full-page mode). Even better, there’s a “link to location” feature, so you can share the cool things you find. Click on the links below the viewer to check out locations other people have found.
Read more about how it was put together on their blog post.
Etsy is a cool site for individuals and small shops to sell their handmade goods; sort of a virtual street fair for the whole world. They’ve got a number of delightfully playful ways to discover products, my favorite being the Time Machine, which allows you to zoom through an infinite spiral of recently posted items. Try the scroll wheel (Windows only, unfortunately); also try grabbing one of the items and throwing it around. Fun stuff.
As Daniel points out in a recent comment, another interesting zooming site is Prezi (formerly ZuiPrezi), a web app for creating presentations based on zooming rather than slides.
The concept of laying your presentation out at various scales and rotations on a single infinite canvas and zooming/panning from place to place is a great one; it helps break you out of the linearity of the typical slide show presentation. They’ve also got some fun UI touches, like the way their main menu is all zooming/rotating as well.
