Something for the photographers: Silverlight Deep-zoom formerly "Sea-Dragon"

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With all the other stuff I've been doing lately I'm champing at the bit to get out and take some more photos. Still here I am slaving over a hot laptop.

Search suggests haven't mentioned Sea-Dragon before - but I've talked about Photosynth, which is one of the technologies that use it. We've been saying since at least last October that Sea-Dragon is going into Silverlight.  Which is exciting stuff, it's also getting a new name "Deep zoom".  Eileen picked up some stuff on this - we have Deep Zoom Composer available for Download. I've had a brief play with it but it's output is really intended to go into something else*; more interesting - to me at least is Photo Zoom. Imagine a "contact sheet" view of your photos with pretty much unlimited zoom in and out. That, in a nutshell is Photozoom. As yet it is not a fully featured photo gallery - it doesn't have the tags and other text that I'd want but as a proof of concept of where this is heading it's exciting stuff.

We always have bit "in the works" that I can't really talk about, but an interesting bit of software came my way this week, and the folks behind it have said I can talk about what it produces. What they've given some of us is a test harness for both ideas, and code to implement them. In what form these see the light of day outside the company and when - if at all - remains to be seen.

So here is one of my favourite pictures, party because I sold it a print of it to someone whose London Office is in there

st pauls Click for the Deep zoom version

The original was 38 Mega-Pixel image and the print was 150x21 CM in size (60" x 8" ) an 8:1 aspect ratio is lousy to view on screen and even worse if you want to store it online.
But now I have a version set up fordeep zoom. - I can find the window of my patron's office, but I can move around it interactively much like looking at a big print hanging on the wall.

Before you click through (a) It needs Silverlight 2 Beta installed. If you get an error about Invalid XML character after installing Silverlight you need to close and restart the browser. (b) The experience is OK with the glidepoint device on my laptop, but it's much better with a wheel mouse.

*Update. My colleague Marc Holmes gave me some info, which is now on his blog, to show me how to upload my frist DeepZoomComposer project to silverlight. You can see it here nothing too fancy, just a few pictures that I happen to like. in one project.