Grand Canyon and Deep Zoom

One of the technologies announced at Mix 08 this year was Deep Zoom as part of Silverlight 2.  It allows you to zoom into incredible amounts of detail in high resolution photos and cleverly only brings back the amount of data you need based on your current view and zoom level.  This allows incredibly smooth zooming experiences and exploring photos is very easy to do now.

You can see the technology in action on https://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

One of the things I did whilst I was in Vegas (apart from getting married - only joking) was to take a helicopter trip out over the Grand Canyon.  Not only did this give me a chance to take some great photos but also do some extreme Photo Stitching - as I've described before in Windows Live Photo Gallery.

These images came out pretty well as you can see in my Flickr gallery and below.  Now I've been to the Canyon before and its scale is awesome - so much so that you can't really appreciate its scale from photos - however, when I combine many photos together you can start to appreciate the gravity of the scenery you are witnessing. 

The best way of exploring these photos of course is using Deep Zoom and here's my album (requires Silverlight 2), cool huh?  To make your own album check out PhotoZoom here.