Communications of the ACM
Prophets of Zoom
Entire newspapers can be compressed in a small Seadragon window.
Credit: Usabilitypost.com
Deep-zooming software, known as zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs), enable information such as text, images, and video to sit on a single, limitless surface that can be viewed at whatever size works best.
One type of presentation software, developed by Prezi, is based on this kind of "infinite canvas." Before giving a demonstration, the presenter can pick waypoints on the canvas to be visited in sequence by pressing a button. The software is equipped with smooth pans, zooms, and rotations from one to the next.
In addition, researchers at Microsoft, the University of California, Berkeley, and Moscow State University are developing ChronoZoom, software that displays timeline presentations with a zoom-based approach. Events are described along a timeline using text, images, and video. The researchers say the zoom-based approach can transform multipage Web sites into a single broad surface that simultaneously displays all content.
Meanwhile, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) are developing VisIt, software that shows particle behavior in nuclear reactions as simple animations. VisIt's zooming ranges from viewing the Milky Way galaxy to a grain of sand, says LBNL's Becky Springmeyer.
From Economist Technology Quarterly
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc. 
, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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