Playing with PhotoZoom

MS Live Labs has a fun app called PhotoZoom.  It’s a cool proof-of-concept around how you might handle and navigate through images. 

One application of this sort of technology that I thought was really cool was in zooming into very VERY large photos.  Stay out to see the big picture, or zoom in to see the smallest of details.  Check out HD-View here. (NOTE: Requires a browser plug-in to be installed.  But it’s well worth it!  More examples below.)

And now you can host your own photos as a zoom-able set.  Check out my “Best of Europe” album HERE.

NOTE: It’s a Silverlight application. I suggest you install the latest beta of version 2.

You can also add PhotoZoom as a Facebook application, and create PhotoZoom albums of your existing albums there.

Disclaimer: These are not full-blown Microsoft products… nor are they any indication of how this technology might be used in future products. In the future these sites or services may go away or be re-packaged in other ways. But, hey.. for now they’re free. And geeky-cool!

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More examples:

Bill Crow e-mailed me another very cool example – The Yosemite Extreme Pano Imaging Project. 

He also pointed me to this blog post on the Expression Blend and Design Team Blog, which links to the latest version of the “Deep Zoom Composer”.

And Paolo Barone responded to my "Tweet" with that Yosemite example, as well as this example from Renault.  (Go to the “Full immersion” link on the left.)

And if you haven’t seen this yet, you really need to check out the Hard Rock Memorabilia site.