Seadragon Makes Me Coo

July 31, 2007

At least year's TED Conference, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demoed some new technology coming out of Microsoft labs. The software being released is called Photosynth, which is pretty cool in its own right, but I was really excited by its underlying technology. Paraphrasing, Seadragon lets you interact with vast amounts of visual data. It doesn't matter how big the collections are or how big the images are. The only thing that limits your performance is the number of pixels on your screen. The moment I cooed was when he zoomed in on a block of text that turned out to be Bleak House in its entirity. More importantly it wasn't an image of text, it was actual text.

Seeing this in video, which you can do below, makes it clear how this could Greatly improve the computing experience. You can start with a bunch of thumbnails of everything in a folder and just keep zooming in to use it, instead of having to open an application. It would make the experience completely seamless. The software probably wouldn't have advanced word processing or image manipulation built in, but software providers could potentially create a hook into Seadragon so you can have the power of Photoshop built into your finder application.

Enough talk though, check out the video and see what I mean.

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