Channel 9 - Entries tagged with DeepZoom

Nike Launches Silverlight-Powered Air Jordan Mosiac

Sarah Perez — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:51:00 GMT

I seem to never tire of seeking out and playing with the online photo mosaics built using Silverlight deep-zoom technology. The latest one to cross my radar is Nike’s “Air Jordan” mosaic called Mosaic 23/25. The homepage of this new site is a photo of Jordan – in the air, of course – has been created by thousands of user-submitted photos of themselves in their Air Jordan shoes. As with any Silverlight-powered deep zoomable interface, you can click or use the controls to move in and out and around the image to see all its various elements. However, this site goes a bit further and adds in multitouch capabilities too. If you’re accessing the site from a Windows 7 PC with multitouch, you can use the touchscreen to navigate through the photos instead.

The Windows Azure platform hosts the whole thing, too, allowing it to responds to increased traffic loads as need be and scale out as new photos are constantly uploaded. Then, every 10 minutes, a new mosaic is generated using all the photos submitted, including the recent uploads.

To see the site in action, go here.

Mooncake Brings DeepZoom to Flickr and SmugMug

Sarah Perez — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:53:00 GMT

How cool is this? The guys over at LiveSide uncovered Felix Wang’s not-so-secret project called Mooncake, which brings DeepZoom capabilities to the photo-sharing sites Flickr and SmugMug. Similar to Microsoft Live Labs’ own PhotoZoom, Mooncake can generate a deep zoomable photo album of your favorite pictures. However, where PhotoZoom pulls in images via an RSS feed, Mooncake tries to make that process even easier – you only need enter your Flickr or SmugMug account info to make your own DeepZoom album which can then be easily embedded on any web site or blog.

To use Mooncake, you must first sign up for the service at http://beta.redmooncake.net.

To create an album, you begin by clicking on create new collection:

Next you choose “add photos.” Here you can select from either Flickr or SmugMug – and uploading from your PC is a feature listed as coming soon:

Once you enter in your username for your preferred photo-sharing service, you can then choose the album drop-down box to show just the photos from a particular online album:

You can select individual photos or click a link to easily select them all. Once you have all the photos selected, click the “add photos” button at the bottom. The service will build a deep-zoomable album for you which you can then preview and share.

The album is embeddable as either a standard viewer (400x400) or mini-viewer (200x200) or you can customize the code to your liking using the viewer size options box at the bottom of the page.

You can then copy and paste the code and add the viewer to any web site on the net as either an object, iframe, or javascript embed.

New Version of DeepEarth Launched

Sarah Perez — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:10:00 GMT

You may remember DeepEarth, an open source community effort that demonstrates the DeepZoom functionality of Silverlight. Now, the demo site for DeepEarth has been updated to include an enhanced user interface and the addition of a few new services. Along with the original Virtual Earth data, you can also choose to see data from OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap, too. This lets you compare data with ease as you switch between the various services.

With the new user interface, you can select form various map types using the control located in the top-left of the site. Here, you’ll find aerial, hybrid, road, Cycle, Mobile, and many other different types of maps to choose from. There’s also a search box that lets you enter in a location and zoom straight to it on the map. For some reason, though, the map displays the word “staging” multiple times across the screen – maybe they weren’t quite ready to go just yet?

(thanks, Adam Kinney)

Silverlight News: Compatibility Updates, New Hard Rock Memorabilia, And More

Sarah Perez — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:50:00 GMT

Last week we saw the release of Silverlight 2, the latest and greatest version of the browser plugin designed for rich media experiences on the web. Since that time, a number of related technologies have also been updated to work with Silverlight 2. These include the following:

Deep Zoom Composer/PhotoZoom Site:

Along with the new version of Silverlight, a new version of the Deep Zoom Composer was also released. The Deep Zoom Composer is a tool which lets you design your own deep zoom creations which can then be uploaded to the Microsoft Live Labs PhotoZoom website, which has been updated as well. The new Deep Zoom Composer doesn’t feature anything new besides Silverlight 2 support except for one minor upgrade which allows you to launch the tool by double-clicking on the DZPRJ file itself.

ICE (Image Composite Editor):

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher created by Microsoft Research. This tool takes a series of overlapping photographs and creates a high-res panorama. The ICE update includes more than just Silverlight 2 support. It also offers the following new features and bug fixes:

Fixed a bug that could cause the program to crash the second time it was run if there were non-English characters in the file paths of source our exported panoramas. (The "Options.xml" bug.)
Fixed a bug that allows more TIFF files to be properly opened
Changed autocrop to recognize 360 panos and provide a better crop rectangle in those cases
Removed Automatic from the Projection menu
Proper output of Silverlight 2 RTM Deep Zoom
Fixed a bug that could cause one input image to be dropped from a panorama seemingly at random
Added integration with the next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery

(Read more about ICE here).

HD View Utilities

The HD View Utilities are a set of tools that help in the production of HD View content. HD View is a new viewer developed by the Microsoft Research Interactive Visual Media group to aid in the display and interaction with very large images. Specifically, the Photoshop Plugin and hdmake were updated, according to LiveSide.

HD View SL

Also of interest to programmers, the source code for HD View SL has been released, as reported by LiveSide. HD View SL is the Silverlight based viewer that is output by ICE and by the Photoshop Plugin. HD View, currently a Windows-only browser plugin, is being migrated to HD View SL, a cross-platform Silverlight RIA.

Hard Rock Memorabilia (Easter Egg!)

OK, now for some fun stuff! Silverlight 2.0’s deep zoom feature is now being shown off on the Hard Rock Memorabilia site. If you already checked out this site before back when it launched, you’ll want to revisit. The new site has had some big performance improvements and also offers nearly double the number of images as before. By the way, did you know that site has an Easter Egg? (I love these!) Here’s a tip – zoom in on Paul McCartney’s letter, the stamp, the image of Paramount, then the Marquee. Keep going…you’ll soon see some Beatles bobble-head dolls appear! Nifty.

New DeepZoom Poster Web Designers Will Love

Sarah Perez — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:52:00 GMT

If you love Deepzoomable stuff as much as I do, you'll love this. The latest example of Silverlight’s cool DeepZoom technology can be found in action here on a poster created to “capture the organized chaos that is website design and development.” (Well, at least that’s what it does according to Shane Morris, a Microsoft User Experience Evangelist.) There’s really nothing much to the site, awebsitenameddesire.com, itself beyond some links to various web design-related conferences. It's the poster that is the main focal point. But still, wow - what a riot! It’s definitely one of those things you can explore forever, finding funny little details along the way. For example, look for the monkey on the rooftop, or, as Shane points out, the hilarious body language between the Graphic Designer, the Information Architect, and the Interaction Designer. If you want a copy of the poster for yourself, follow the user sitenameddesire on Twitter and stay tuned for an update.

Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Project

Sarah Perez — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:26:00 GMT

The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project began last year as a way to create a snapshot in time of the present-day geologic conditions at Yosemite National Park. Using gigapixel imagery, the goal was to construct a large scale image of the valley walls in high detail. The end result would aid research in the area of rockfall activity as well as become an asset to the park’s search and rescue operations. The shooting began in May of this year. To get the images, 70 photographers are hiking through the park with robotic cameras in tow which are positioned by GPS coordinates to take the shot. They even communicate via radio to synchronize when the shot is to be taken. Scoble has video about this project here.

Now Adam Kinney is reporting that the Silverlight Deep Zoom version of this site is live. Using the Deep Zoom feature built into Silverlight, you can zoom in and out of 45 gigapixels worth of Yosemite Park data. You have to try this! Go here. It’s incredible.

Oh and, Doug, you wanted to know where all the dope Silverlight demos were? Ha. We’ve got applications.

P.S. Tafiti and the Hard Rock Memorabilia site aren’t bad examples either.

DeepZooming into (US) Tax Dollars

Larry Larsen — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:25:00 GMT

DeepZoom really shines in showing a large amount of information. To get a sense of this, check out Jess Bachman's Death and Taxes poster. This ginormous infographic shows you where much of the US Federal budget will go in 2009. By using a mouse with a scrollwheel, you can fluidly move in and out of the graphic, digging around through branches and departments of the government.

Jess stopped by recently and told us about how it started, how long it takes to make, his 800-layer Photoshop file, and his Martha Stewart appearance. You can explore the poster in Silverlight here and get the print poster at WallStats.com.

PhotoZoom Facebook App

Sarah Perez — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:31:00 GMT

PhotoZoom, the web site that leverages the new Deep Zoom technology which makes your photos "zoomable" now has a Facebook app all of its own. The PhotoZoom application lets you create Facebook photo albums that use this Deep Zoom technology. You can choose to convert your existing albums to PhotoZoom albums or just create new ones. After you add the app, you'll be taken to the PhotoZoom site to get started. Very cool! (via LiveSide)

PhotoZoom Combines Deep Zoom and Silverlight

Sarah Perez — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:25:00 GMT

We recently mentioned how you could make your own Deep Zoom using the Deep Zoom Composer. Now comes and even easier way. With PhotoZoom, a new web-based service, you can easily create albums either by uploading photos from your PC or by importing photos from an RSS feed, like perhaps the one you have at a photo-sharing site like flickr.

Then, using PhotoZoom, you can create albums from a set of photos where your set becomes a collage, built with Silverlight, that you can pan around and zoom in and out of, just like the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia site.

You can email your album to a friend, or, thanks to the guys at LiveSide, you can embed it on your own site by following these 3 steps:

View your zooming album on PhotoZoom, so that the url reads: photozoom.mslivelabs.com/Album.aspx?alias=XXX&album=X
View the page source and find the following: "silverlight.services.live.com"
Copy the entire iframe code, which will look something like this:
/iframe.html originalAttribute="src" originalPath="http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/14030//iframe.html "
scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="800" height="600">

You can customize the width and height as required, then just paste your code into your own website/blog etc.

See an embedded PhotoZoom in action here.