One of the really cool technologies that I have come across recently is photosynth and deepzoom from Microsoft. The core idea behind the technology is to allow people to access large amount of visual information seamlessly. The obvious use case that we use regularly ( I use it almost daily) is maps. There are obviously a lot of uses I can think of for sharing photographic images. Panoramas come to mind. Panoramic images, and extreme Wide angle images are difficult to view because we are constrained by the monitor size. I have not seen good viewers where one can seamlessly see overview and jump in to see details in specific places. The ability to do that is cool.

One of the strengths of the seadragon technology is that they are able to remain resolution independent. Watch this TED lecture to get a lot better understanding of what the technology is capable of. Microsoft has been releasing a series of tools to help people use the technology and the latest tool is the deepzoom composer. To experience some of the cool presentations, one needs to have silverlight (A naive way to explain it is to call it a Adobe Flash competitor) but Microsoft has been very thoughtful to include an AJAX client to view deepzoom compositions.

There are times when we see something that makes us sit up and watch in awe. I felt that when I watched the presentation on Photosynth and I got goose bumps again when I was able to shoot a bunch of images and create the image below in less than 15 minutes. Awesome. Enjoy!

I would suggest you click on the Full Screen icon and Zoom and pan across the image. I have embedded a few high resolution zooms (which are easy to see due to the different exposure settings. Look into them and you will be pleasantly surprised.

I will make things a bit more interesting – Can you find the following images?

If you do, tell me in the comments the approximate location

If you are reading via a rss reader, please visit the site for the deep-zoom content.