Cool things in Seadragon: AppleTree

Scott Mueller is developing a site, AppleTree, with a hefty premise: map out the family tree of the whole world. That’s a lot of data, so he’s chosen to display it with Seadragon. You can zoom and pan around the whole tree, and click on various elements for further interaction.

In addition, for any one person you can have a number of photos. He is using Seadragon there as well to display the images, and has built a gallery interface around it.

From a technical standpoint, he is using Seadragon Ajax on the front end with lots of custom touches. On the back end, he periodically rebuilds all the tiles that make up the tree, building slight variations into each tile level, so that for instance, underlines show up only when you’re zoomed in enough to click on a name.

Rather than load all of the (potentially millions of) click targets at once, it sends a query back to the server for every click to see if anything interesting was hit; if so the frontend takes the appropriate action. You can click the underlined name in a node to go to that person’s page on the site. Clicking a diamond of a node brings you to that person’s other spouse. If the diamond has a number in it indicating multiple spouses, a dialog box will pop up asking you which spouse you want to zoom to. Finally clicking an egg brings you to that person’s parents if they aren’t already underneath them.

There are certainly some rough edges here and there, but it’s great to see Seadragon Ajax getting pushed in new directions like this!

– Ian Gilman

The new Seadragon.com!

We’ve taken all of the pieces of Seadragon technology and wrapped them up in a nice bow with the new seadragon.com. Just drop the URL to any image on the web (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF, etc.) into the box, and we serve up a smooth zooming Seadragon viewer for it. Behind the scenes we’re using DeepZoomTools on an Azure server to handle the conversion, and serving it up using Silverlight Deep Zoom when available and Seadragon Ajax when not. The result is (hopefully) an extremely smooth and simple experience, even though there’s so many bits that make it up.

It all started with a suggestion from Sean Dunn, which rolled into Out of the Box projects by Aseem Kishore and Boyd Ferris. Ben Vanik wrote the Silverlight viewer we’re using, and James Darpinian wrapped it up with Seadragon Ajax so we can use Silverlight if available and JavaScript otherwise. From there, Aseem did the lion’s share of the work to build out the service and tie the whole thing together, with UI design by Shepherd Yang. Ken Perkins kept us all on track, and Jesse Wang made sure the whole thing was solid. Of course everyone on the Seadragon team was involved in one way or another, and we’re all terribly excited to have it finally up on the web!

We’re especially interested to see how people end up using the site. Every time there’s a huge image posted on digg, I’d love to see it posted via seadragon.com so people can see it better. I can see Seadragon being a great alternative to ViewOnBlack for sharing your Flickr images. People can even use it to present their art portfolios on their own sites. If you see or think of any interesting uses, I’d love to hear about it!

Recording a Seadragon session?

I’ve just been chatting with Kent Sullivan, a member of the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association, and he’s got a cool Seadragon idea that requires some dev help. Basically he’s looking to record a user’s movements in realtime as they pan and zoom around an extremely large image, so that those movements can then be played back synchronized to the audio of that person talking about the contents of the image.

This sort of technology would be useful for a lot of scenarios. In Kent’s case, it’s part of a multi-year project, in partnership with the Great Northern Railway Historical Society, to digitize and make available thousands of different documents and photos that help describe the history of these two important railroads (now part of the BNSF).

One of the projects he’s working on involves train sheets, the sheets upon which dispatchers recorded the movement of every train across a given geographical area during a 24-hour period. There is a treasure trove of information in these sheets because it helps historians (and railfans, and modelers) understand how a network of trains interacted to move passengers and freight – and what the volumes were, and who was doing the work. Each sheet is about 6’ long x 2’ high.

They’re just beginning the process of scanning the sheets that were been saved by the NPRR, a sample of the thousands that were created down through the years. These sheets take some explanation in order to understand them, however, as they are very densely populated and many abbreviations are used. Fortunately, a few dispatchers who created the sheets are still with us, and one of them has volunteered to describe a sample sheet for recording purposes during his trip to Seattle on August 5.

Kent and I both think that Seadragon would be a fabulous way for this dispatcher to give an interactive tour of the sample sheet. What Kent needs help with is creating a mechanism to record the dispatcher’s movements with Seadragon and a way to synchronize the audio narration that he provides. Could someone in Seadragon community help? Maybe there are some railfans out there? Leave a note in the comments or email igilman@microsoft.com.

– Ian Gilman

Infinite Canvas back in business

As previously mentioned, we had to relocate Infinite Canvas to a new server. Fortunately the folks at JGate have been very helpful in getting us set up, and the folks at AppJet have kindly redirected the original domain to point at the new server, so all the old links work and everything should function the way it did before. I’ve turned editing back on and everything looks good, so it’s back to our previously-scheduled explorations in visual expression!

Zoom Quilt

One of the coolest applications of zooming technology (from an aesthetic standpoint) is the Zoom Quilt projects. Artists work collaboratively to create hugely detailed scenes with a focused center point into which the next artist’s piece zooms, and the next, and so forth, revealing an seamless thread of intricate worlds within worlds.

The creativity here is tremendously impressive and demonstrates the power of zooming as a community endeavor. The first Zoom Quilt was done five years ago — pioneers!

Zoom Quilt 1 (2004)

Zoom Quilt 2 (2007)

–Kate Welch

New Deep Zoom Composer features

Janete Perez on the Expression team has written up intros to some of the new features in the June 2009 Deep Zoom Composer release. Check them out:

Adding Links

Creating Menus

Slideshow Support

(via)

– Ian Gilman

Infinite Canvas is relocating

My Infinite Canvas web app has been running on AppJet, which has been delightful, but they’ve just announced that they are discontinuing hosting on July 1st. I’m looking into where to move it to and how to make it as smooth a transition as possible. I’ll update here once it’s been sorted out.

UPDATE: Looks like I’ve successfully moved it to JGate, which has taken up the AppJet torch. Take a look and see what you think; it should be identical. Once I’m happy with the transfer I’ll turn editing features back on again.

UPDATE 2: The move is complete, and the folks at AppJet have been nice enough to redirect the original URL, so both http://infinitecanvas.jgate.de and http://infinitecanvas.appjet.net now work. I’ve turned editing back on and everything looks good! Let me know if you have any problems.

Peacock: Zooming in the Aviary

A lot of people are doing things with zooming on existing data, where the zooming is a purely exploratory feature. You see fewer examples of creation tools in a zooming context. I mean, Photoshop lets you zoom in and out of its canvas, but in terms of zooming UI, it’s pretty rudimentary. Prezi is a good example, and even my Infinite Canvas counts, simple as it is.

The folks at Aviary are doing some amazing things, bringing creativity apps to the web. In terms of zooming interfaces, check out their Peacock, which has a zooming canvas for you to lay your effects patches onto. Interestingly enough, unlike Prezi or Infinite Canvas, the zooming canvas is just a behind-the-scenes organizational tool, rather than the image itself.

Also of note, since it’s a web app, they’ve got the community built in, including the easy ability to derive new works off of other people’s creations, and to track and explore the “family tree” of any work (much like AppJet). This distributed collaboration model seems to be gaining steam, and I definitely see it as the future of creativity.

- Ian Gilman

Deep Zoom on Linux: Moonlight 2.0 preview

So Silverlight works on Windows and Mac (though unfortunately not PowerPC Macs), but what about Linux? The Moonlight project is in fact just that, and they’ve now released a preview of Moonlight 2.0, which has all the features of Silverlight 2.0 including Deep Zoom. Check it out to see Photosynth, Hard Rock Memorabilia, and all your favorites running in Linux. They even have an entire development tool chain in Linux, so you can not only view Silverlight sites, but also create new ones. It’s just a preview at this point, so don’t expect it to be perfect, you know the drill.

- Ian Gilman

Cool Things in Seadragon: World Digital Library

The World Digital Library is a collection of significant primary documents from countries and cultures around the world.  The folks over there have put them online (as of April 21st) to both promote cultural understanding as well as to provide a resource for educators and scholars.  They’ve also utilized Seadragon Ajax to do so, and the end product is really, really cool.

Simply select a world region that you want to explore and you’ll be taken to a page containing all of your “search results” and a pane on the left to help you narrow down the items you have available to you.  Picking an individual item will give you a general description and all of the item’s particulars, such as creation date, author, location etc.  One more click on the item will send you into the Seadragon Ajax portion of the site, where you can zoom and pan around the item to your hearts content.  There’s a ton of interesting documents and photos to peruse here, so if you’re having a hard time choosing, start with a personal favorite of mine, the iconic photo of pea-pickers by Dorothea Lange.

The images do suffer from some pixel drift, though this is a product of using Kapil’s Python script for image conversion to DZI. It is also worth noting that this same gentleman did development on the WDL site.  They’ve also changed the Seadragon Ajax UI buttons, but that’s to incorporate a “next” and “previous” button for documents that have multiple pages.  It’s a wonderful site, and I suggest you check it out.

-Kevin Hanes