Deep Zoom

For those of you that don't know what deep zoom is, just take a look at the Memorabilia section on the Hard Rock Cafe website. Another good application shows all newspaper headlines about Obama after the election (here). Now we were shown how to set up deep zoom for a silverlight application, so don't know if it will work on a WPF application, but my guess is we can find a way of making it work.

In fact it is extremely easy to do using a tool called Deep Zoom Composer. The person doing the presentation literally too about 3 minutes to get a silverlight up and running using deep zoom composer. The very interesting thing was when he started adding extra functionality to the application using a combination of Expressions Design, Expressions Blend and Visual Studio, because i had the chance to see how the tools are ment to be used with each other to create amazing looking UI very easily.

Now the Deep Zoom demo wasn't the WOW factor of this session. It was what is called Photosynth. This is something has hasn't completely been released, but there is an online service that allows you to set something up and use it. It used 3D WPF stuff, so it doesn't work as part of silverlight. Anyway, the idea is this (and brace youselves, because if you don't get impressed it's probably because i haven't manged to get accross what you can do), you basically take many pictures, from close and far and round up down (whatever you want) of an area. Then you can have them atomatatically put together into a deep zoom enabled environment that alows you to zoom in out as well as pan and rotate in a 3D virtual like tour of the area you photographed.

Now i know it sounds weird and hard to explain, but take a look at http://photosynth.net/. We've been busy taking many photos of our room, and the Tech-Ed exibition area to try and use this to do a demo when we get back. Where can we use this? Well i'm not going to give you the answer. Just a good clue: real-estate applictions?