Andreas Sefzig

A few days ago I discovered the Deep Zoom-Technology and was fascinated right away. Actually I saw Screencasts of the underlying SeaDragon-Technology, combined with Photosynth (an acquisition of Microsoft) a year ago at TED, yet I didn’t even think it might work in websites. Well, now it does thanks to Silverlight!
 

In a nutshell, Deep Zoom allows you to view large images by only sending to your browser the portion of the image that you will actually be viewing on your screen. Spiced up with the ability to pan and zoom across your image smoothly, this works very similar to online maps.
 

Of course I felt the urge to play around with this, of course focussing on the inclusion in a Javascript-Ajaxy way. These examples cover basic concepts for online-ads, single images, image collections as well as beautyfull women and places, all included via a handy “append/remove object”-function. Some of these examples make use of the free hosting-service offered by the development team. You may use my undocumented “easy-to-use-easy-to-setup”-Javascript-SDK which allows to include both selfhosted and Microsoft-hosted projects.
 

Microsofts hosting-service lets you get around installing the Deepzoom Composer (.NET Framework 3.5 required) and hosting the (hopefully massive ;) image-data yourself - yet I recommend creating your project offline since it’ll allow you to layout the images in your collection precisely - take a look at the UserGuide.pdf. Well, not in any case: the hosting-service allows to convert a Media-RSS-feed (for example from Flickr) into an album, which is pretty intriguing. But… how many feeds linking hi-res-imagery are out there? I’ve found none so far…
 

There are a million and one uses for this:

1. Online ads: The bottleneck of any ad-delivery is the creative’s filesize, which prevents from advertising with hi-res-images on the web. By loading only the relevant data, initialized by the user and after the pageload, Deepzoom behaves like a streaming ad. Yet one has to bear in mind the distribution of the silverlight-plugin. Yet it can be bypassed easily with an “if not silverlight then use flash”-plugin-sniffer.
2. Galerys: Hi-res arts, fashion photography, posters and probes have a hard time being distributed offline or taking the loss of a unbearable download-time. Not anymore: You may use my SDK above to show off your Oevre online in a sleek fashion, saving on useless traffic generated by unseen details. If you use the SDK, please drop me a note ;)
3. Advertising-Agencies: Our “offliners” too have a hard time distributing hi-res material to the clients for finetuning or pitches. Of course they have found manageable ways to do this - now with Deepzoom it’s become more manageable to combine artwork in a web-collection.
4. Photo-Plugins: With Deep Zooms sleekness in mind I also see some neat uses as a plugin for social communities like Facebook
5. Other: Well, there is another great use which I won’t illustrate here (Are you male and have my secret Site-Key? Then take a look at this!). Anyways, producers of porn may contact me for technical contracts ;)

I’ll end my post with a call: Please inform me when

• you have found a way to set the default-position and -zoom within a collection,
• you have used my Javascript-SDK,
• you have developed something you think I should know.

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