Deep Zoom Blog

Our latest deepzoom website features the crafty art of digital scrapbooking, allowing its users to upload scrapbooks they’ve made to share with their friends and family. The Wall is a collage of all the community’s scrapbooks and shows off the vibrant colours and creative keepsakes made by the site’s members.

The DaisyTrail Scrapbook Wall

Zooming into the wall allows the user to click on individual scrapbooks and see information entered by their creator. There is also a slideshow option for surfers who just want to sit back and watch what’s been uploaded.

DaisyTrail Scrapbook Wall, zoomed in

The site also allows each individual scrapbook to be explored using deepzoom:

A DaisyTrail digital scrapbook

Visit the site yourself to check it out: DaisyTrail.

Entertaining one this - FractLOL! at robburke.NET is another fun Deep Zoom photomosaic of a massive lolcat collection. Do cute cats and silly captions ever get old?

I have quite a flavour, don't you know.

Please sir, may I have a cheeseburger?

Definitely the most exciting use of Deep Zoom to date, the DeepEarth prototype demonstrates exploration of our planet with a scale and power comparable to Google Earth. Presumably using the same data as Microsoft Virtual Earth, it is a fair bit more out of date than Google Earth (a look at my road shows a half finished construction site, though my house has been built for close to 10 years now). This doesn’t detract from the slick feel of the site though.

DeepEarth: Europe

A click of the ‘Hybrid’ button turns on the roads overlay, while ‘Road’ shows roads only.

DeepEarth: Nottingham roads

The level of detail appears to be fairly complete for non-western parts of the world too.

DeepEarth: Mouth of the Amazon

Check out the DeepEarth prototype now!

Another tidy example of how well Deep Zoom combines with photo mosaics, this Dogs Photomosaic includes thousands of photographs of dogs from Flickr making up a composite of a photograph of the author’s puppy, as taken by his daughter. The blog post explains how he used AndreaMosaic to generate the photo mosaic, then ran it through the Deep Zoom Composer.

Here’s a screenshot:

Check out the blog post by the author, and the Deep Zoom Photomosaic. If you’ve come across any other interesting or pretty Deep Zoom examples, please email me at davedx@gmail.com!

The Death and Taxes 2009 Wallchart gives a detailed graphical breakdown of US budget expenditure in 2009. Panning around seems a little twitchy - make sure you’ve completely stopped moving the mouse completely before letting go of the mouse button.

Riding the web wave of Obama’s leadership win, the Deep Zoom Obama site deservedly ranks very well in Google. Another unique Deep Zoom approach, the site features a composition of thousands of photographs of Barack Obama during his leadership race arranged according to each photo’s colour balance and lightness to form a giant mosaic of the presidential hopeful.

Deep Zoom Obama - mosaic composite

Deep Zoom Obama - zoomed in

The BBC put together a “Big Zoomy Photo Thing” for their May 2008 Big Weekend, featuring audience and band photos and “spot the nine Jo Whileys”.

Radio 1 Big Weekend using Deep Zoom

An interesting feature is how the collage incorporates a Radio 1 logo cutout as a “keyhole” into the deeper zoom levels.

Check out the Big Weekend Deep Zoom.

Almost certainly the first prominent website to make use of Deep Zoom, the Hard Rock Cafe’s Memorabilia minisite is an excellent showcase of Deep Zoom and Silverlight.

Hard Rock Memorabilia

The Hard Rock Cafe web team have built a fantastic wall of zoomable images made from high resolution photographs of the various rock memorabilia found in their chain of restaurants across the world.

Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia Wall

Certainly the first prominent roll-out of a Deep Zoom website, and still one of the best. Check it out now!

The Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia website