Seadragon or picture zooming in amazing speed
Yesterday I came across with a very amazing product, called seadragon. It is a company, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. This software is capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces. The video shows you some of the astonishing features, what is possible today:
Microsoft plans to bundle such capabilities in the next Silverlight version. These awesome features combined with a hard core GUI programming features will give Silverlight the awaited push in the current race with Flash/Flex. In the end it is a question, which product will win the hearts of the developer community.
Here you will find more about Seadragon. Seadragon will fulfill the following four “promises”:
- Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
- Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
- Transitions are smooth as butter.
- Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.
The Seadragon team is currently tuning its DirectX implementation, making the most of the new Windows Media Photo format, and cranking on the Photosynth Technology Preview.
