Photo Zoom

It has been long time since I updated my blog. Since my internship began I was quite busy at work. For those of you who don't know, I am now doing my SIP (Student Internship Programme) at Microsoft Innovation Centre (MIC). It's really a nice place to work. As a developer, I got the chance to learn and apply my knowledge of programming. It's also very interesting to learn about new technologies such as PhotoSynth, Windows Azure cloud computing platform, Windows Live Services, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and so on. These technologies enables us, developers, to try out new, interesting, efficient way of developing applications to provide solutions to real-life problems.

In this post, I would like to share about is Deep Zoom. As I am a shutter-bug, I usually upload photos on online photosharing site such as Flickr, Picasa Web Album,etc. Most of the time, I resized the photos that I took and upload in considering of loading time (An average full resolution photos from my Canon 400D camera is about 4MB in size). In addition, view the pic in its full size would be not very user-friendly as once user click on small thumbnail of photo on my blog, it would open the photo in new tab/IE windows and start to download the whole photo. So, in times when the internet traffic is slow during peak hour, it would take some time to load and view the whole picture.

Thus, today, I tested out Seadragon which is from Microsoft Live Labs. It provides great zooming capabilities for the full resoution photos. As a "Hello World" experienment, I uploaded one photo taken at Botanic Gardens about one month ago and tested out the Seadragon Ajax which uses JavaScript to add Deep Zoom viewer to my blog as follows. At first look, it will look like a normal photo of 400x300 pixels size embedded as image on the blog. But no, mouse-over the photo to view the different buttons on the lower right corner of the photo. Click on +/- buttons to zoom in/out and click and drag on the photo to move around different parts of the photo in zoom mode. Want to see the whold photo? Just click on the Home button. Try zooming in until you could see the fine details of the leaves. It's fast and smooth to zoom in/out and view different part of the photo in details, considering the huge file size of that full resolution photo.




As I am still exploring Seadragon, I will update soon with more info about its features.