Where to go for Seadragon news?

As recent as a year ago, it was pretty easy to keep track of all the stuff going on in the Seadragon world… a few people were doing interesting things with Deep Zoom, but otherwise it was pretty quiet. Nowadays there’s new stuff (projects, content, tools, code examples, etc.) all the time. I do my best to keep track of it and share it in various ways, but I haven’t found one single best channel; it’s all kind of scattered about. Perhaps I should fix this state of affairs and consolidate somehow, but for starters I think I’ll just share what I’ve got.

• There is of course this blog.
• I (and others) tweet from @livelabs.
• I bookmark zooming-related sites (many but not all having to do with Seadragon) on Delicious.
• I share interesting posts I find on Google Reader.
• I’ve also recently started a Twine for Seadragon-related stuff… we’ll see how that goes, but I like the fact that multiple people can contribute to it. The Zooming Group has a similar feature, and in fact my Delicious bookmarks (along with those of others) are replicated there, but it’s much broader than just Seadragon stuff. That’s cool, but it’s also nice to have the specific focus sometimes.

What do you think? How best to keep track of all the interesting stuff that’s going on?

– Ian Gilman

Fast Flip

Google Labs has come out with an interesting way to read through some of your daily news, Google Fast Flip.  Essentially placing news pages on an infinte, scrolling,  canvas that allows you to “flip” through articles in a series or one-up view.  No zooming to be had here,  sadly, though it seems to be begging for it; add some constrained or free zoom to this action and you can color me excited!

Fast Flip has received the usual Google design once-over, ensuring that content is your focus, not layout or interaction.  You can use the arrow keys to navigate, but only once you are in the one-up view.   It also feels like I should be able to click and drag to move through the feed, but that seems to be missing, too. Other than these details, it’s pretty slick, quick and easy to use.  Now if only I could add my own feeds to it and really get crankin’.

-Kevin Hanes

New in Zooming: Sony Gets Some.

The folks over at Gizmodo have a delightful article on a zooming technology that Sony has demoed for both the PS3 as well as their portable device, the PSP.  From the video you can see a lot of the nice touches that we’ve come to expect of high-quality zooming implementations.  Things like springs for smooth zooming, total responsiveness to the user and remarkably fast resolve time from one zoom level to the next.  It truly is mesmerizing to watch.

The ability and apparent usability of the PSP (at 2:10 into the video) is particularly cool.  The portable device’s navigation buttons appear to be intuitive and every bit as performant as on PS3.  I can’t wait to see what people come up with after Sony ships this to developers “soon”.

-Kevin Hanes

Infinite Photograph

Photo mosaics are nothing new, even though they are super cool and great fodder for zooming. Infinite photo mosaics, however, are even better.

The Infinite Photograph project by National Geographic starts out as a lovely landscape photograph which allows the user to zoom in on a square area of the photo, transforming that grid neatly into a photo mosaic comprised of pictures submitted to My Shot. Zoom in more to get an idea of what you’re looking at, then select a photo from the grid and start the process all over again. Very slick! (And they’ve even got one especially for pictures of dogs.)

There are limitations, of course: though it feels like it probably is “infinite” in that you can keep clicking into level after level of mosaic, some areas tend to repeat the same few photos over and over to achieve the right color. Once the My Shot photograph database has more to choose from, this will be less of an issue. Additionally, it feels clunky to click inside such a structurally rigid grid in order to zoom — but maybe I’m just spoiled by that buttery-smooth Seadragon zooming experience. (Is that too self-serving?)

–Kate Welch

Spezify

One thing I generally like about developing internet technology is the idea of “everything, all the time”. Sometimes this can be a muddy concept that gets in the way of effective communication, but when done well, it can save the user precious visual time they might otherwise spend looking in several places for similar sets of information.

Spezify is a Flash-powered service that allows users to search for terms and retrieve results as a visual canvas of assorted media. Photos, videos, articles, and Twitter updates relevant to the search query populate the screen, pannable in all directions. It also retrieves a list of words relevant to your search, so you can easily browse different results (by clicking the word) or additional, more specific results (by clicking the pink “+” next to the word). One-click search refinement sounds pretty great; I like the idea of being able to maximize my laziness and yet still dive deeper and find new content. One down side: you can’t zoom, which is usually our first instinct. Still, this does give what is surely a milder version of the Clockwork Orange information overload experience, without any of the nasty brainwashing side effects.

– Kate Welch

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