Deep Zoom is a technology developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

for efficiently transmitting and viewing images. It allows users to pan around and zoom in on a large,

high resolution Image resolution is the level of detail of an image. The term applies to digital images, film images, and other types of images. "Higher resolution" means more image detail. Image resolution can be measured in various ways. Resolution quantifies ...

image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by

downloading In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar systems. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote s ...

only the region being viewed or only at the resolution it is displayed at. Subsequent regions are downloaded as the user pans to (or zooms into) them;

animations Animation is a filmmaking technique whereby still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animati ...

are used to hide any jerkiness in the transition. The libraries are also available in other platforms including

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

and

Flash Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional aliases * The Flash, several DC Comics superheroes with super speed: ** Flash (Jay Garrick) ** Barry Allen ** Wally West, the first Kid Flash and third adult Flash ...

History

The Deep Zoom file format is very similar to the

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...

image format where images are broken into tiles and then displayed as required. The tiling typically follows a quadtree pattern of increasing resolution of image (in other words twice the zoom and twice the resolution). The main difference is that with Google Maps the actual details on the image change from one zoom level to another, while with Deep Zoom the same image is displayed at each zoom level.

Seadragon Software Seadragon Software was a team within the Microsoft Live Labs. Its product, Seadragon, is a web optimized visualization technology that allows graphics and photos to be smoothly browsed, regardless of their size. Seadragon is the technology powerin ...

, formerly Sand Codex, first created the Seadragon technology and its implementation of what is now called Deep Zoom. This technology was then absorbed into the

Microsoft Live Labs Microsoft Live Labs was a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research that focused on applied research for Internet products and services at Microsoft. Live Labs was headed by Dr. Gary William Flake, who prior to joining Microsoft was a princip ...

when Seadragon Software was acquired. Engineers from Seadragon now work with Microsoft to integrate their work into technology such as

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich internet applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later version ...

and

Photosynth Photosynth is a discontinued app and service from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and 3D reconstruction, generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographe ...

Deep Zoom examples

The most famous implementation of Deep Zoom was probably the first: the memorabilia collection at th
Hard Rock website
Conceived and designed by Duncan/Channon and built by Vertigo, it was demonstrated for the first time in March 2008 at the

Microsoft MIX MIX was a Microsoft conference held annually for Web developers and designers at which Microsoft showcased upcoming web technologies. The conference was held each spring at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Unlike many of Microsoft's technical co ...

convention in

Las Vegas Las Vegas, colloquially referred to as Vegas, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and the county seat of Clark County. The Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area is the largest within the greater Mojave Desert, and second-l ...

. In 2010,

partnered with the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

to create

ChronoZoom ChronoZoom is a free open source project that visualizes time on the broadest possible scale from the Big Bang to the present day. Conceived by Walter Alvarez and Roland Saekow and developed by the department of Earth and Planetary Science at th ...

, a DeepZoom-powered time visualization tool that pushed the limits of DeepZoom, since it required zooming from the scale of 13 billion years down to a single day. The project has since graduated to development under

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

. Another example is th
Deep Earth
project. It is described b
its creators
as "a community project focused on creating a rich interactive mapping control using Silverlight2 Deep Zoom. Concentrating on Microsoft Virtual Earth imagery and data the project offers team members the opportunity to learn and share while creating something cool and useful." A paintings collection project http://galleryzoom.co.uk/ shows 1000 high resolution/sensor images individually indexed. (Using Deep Zoom Composer). Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave a demonstration of Seadragon and

at the 2007 TED conference. In November 2009,

352 Media Group 35 or XXXV may refer to: * 35 (number) * 35 BC * AD 35 * 1935 * 2035 Science * Bromine, a halogen in the periodic table * 35 Leukothea, an asteroid in the asteroid belt Music * ''XXXV'' (album), a 2002 album by Fairport Convention * ''35xxxv'', ...

, a Silverlight developer in the Microsoft Silverlight Partner Program, created an example of Deep Zoom using Microsoft Silverlight version 3. It is online a
352 Media Group's Web site
Th
Winston Churchill Deep Zoom
mosaic, created by Silverlight developer
Shoothill
features as both an online interactive deep zoom and a standalone deep zoom which forms part of the Churchill exhibit in the

Churchill War Rooms The Churchill War Rooms is a museum in London and one of the five branches of the Imperial War Museum. The museum comprises the ''Cabinet War Rooms'', a historic underground complex that housed a British government command centre throughout the ...

in Whitehall. In 2010, Shoothill built th
Sumatran Tiger Deep Zoom
- the largest seen to date - for worldwide conservation charit
Fauna and Flora International
featuring thousands of images of endangered species. An early example of Deep Zoom-like technology was implemented at The Department of Maori Affairs in New Zealand in 1997. The technology was used to display Maori land ownership.

Deep Zoom images

The file format used by Deep Zoom (as well as

and Seadragon Ajax) is XML based. Users can specify a single large image (dzi) or a collection of images (dzc). It also allows for "Sparse Images"; where some parts of the image have greater resolution than others, an example of which can be found on th
Seadragon Ajax home page
The bike image displayed is a sparse image. Though used in the proprietary Deep Zoom, the dzi format is open and able to be used by anyone.

Deep Zoom image (dzi)

A DZI has two parts: a DZI file (with either a .dzi or .xml extension) and a subdirectory of image folders. Each folder in the image subdirectory is labeled with its level of resolution. Higher numbers correspond to a higher resolution level; inside each folder are the image tiles corresponding to that level of resolution, numbered consecutively in columns from top left to bottom right.

Deep Zoom collection (dzc)

A DZC is a collection of some number of DZIs linked and referenced by a DZC file (with either a .dzc or .xml extension). At a high level, a collection is a number of image thumbnails whose location is kept track of by the .dzc/.xml file, when zooming into an image, it accesses greater resolutions tiles. A DZC's structure is similar to that of a DZI; the .dzc/.xml file defines the collection and the subdirectory of folders maps to the DZI file structure, each with their set of .dzi/.xml and image tiles. The DZC is used in Microsoft's Pivot, but not in SeaDragon per se.

Sparse Images

Sparse images are a sub-classification of the DZI file type. A sparse image is normally a number of separate photographs with varying resolution levels that have been placed in a single DZI instead of a DZC. Sparse images have no different file structure than that of a DZI and differ only in that there is not a single "highest resolution" level for the entire DZI.

Software that uses Deep Zoom

Image Composite Editor Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher made by the Microsoft Research division of Microsoft Corporation. The application takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and creates ...

- image stitching tool created by Microsoft Research * Deep Zoom Composer - collage maker and simple panorama tool created by Microsoft. Images' resolution is maintained when exporting for web use (via Silverlight Deep Zoom or JavaScript using
third-party template
. No longer available for download from Microsoft though it can be found on various other sources such as Internet Archive.

iPhone OS development

Microsoft Live Labs has created an application for the

App Store An app store, also called an app marketplace or app catalog, is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not i ...

called Seadragon Mobile.https://www.engadget.com/2008/12/14/microsoft-releases-first-iphone-application-seadragon/ Microsoft releases first iPhone/iPod application, Seadragon It is run over the internet and includes Deep Zoom on the following categories; art, history, maps, photos,

which anybody can upload to, space and technology & web.

References

External links

The Official Microsoft Silverlight SiteA DeepZoom PrimerMSDN Overview in Silverlight for DevelopersDownload Deep Zoom ComposerDynamically generated DeepZoom image of Mandelbrot Fractal, Google AppEngine SDK Demo (Java), Webpage using Microsoft SeaDragon AJAX for DeepZoom displayDynamically generated DeepZoom image of Mandelbrot Fractal, Google AppEngine SDK Demo (Java), ClipFlair Studio Image component (Silverlight) used for displayOpenSeadragon
uses Deep Zoom technology.
Zoomo
- image sharing website, uses OpenSeadragon for its image display.
Zoomable
- conversion tool, API available {{Microsoft Research Labs, state=uncollapsed Microsoft Live Labs Graphics software IOS software 2008 software