Silver Machine? No, Silverlight

Don’t you love it when two of your favourite things come together?  In this case, it’s cool technology and rock and roll.

When I was still at Microsoft, I saw a couple of very, very cool demos of a technology called SeaDragon which enables magical things to happen with images.  Some of this has now gone live, under the name Deep Zoom (not Deep Thought) as part of Silverlight 2.0, on the web-site of the Hard Rock organisation.  Hard Rock’s famous memorabilia collection is now available to be viewed in astounding detail.  From a screen of 258 tiny, quarter-thumbnails, you can zoom in on any picture in sufficient detail to see the rust on the screws on guitars or the stitching on Jimi Hendrix’s jacket. 

What practical use?  Well aside from enabling unparalleled access to museum collections around the world, imagine a web-based advertisement for, say, Jaguar or BMW where the user could zoom into any detail they wanted?  Not just the layout of the dashboard, not even the font used for the instrument panel but right down to the grains of dust on the glass.  That is powerful technology.  Imagine an image of screen shot of little black dashes like DNA samples where every black smudges was the entire contents of a book.

Hard Rock Memorabilia

Tip of the hat to Steve Clayton’s blog for publicising this.

 

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