Bill Crow's dashboard

Hi John,

To #1:

We're a labs organization; lots of stuff we do is just an experiment; other things get integrated into products or we share them (via www.seadragon.com or other channels) to gather feedback, or enable and inspire new ideas.

We gave the Seadragon Ajax code to the team at Microsoft delivering the ASP.net Ajax Control Toolkit open source project. They've integrated Seadragon into the toolkit and it's framework. They're managing this open source project, and anyone can contribute enhancements.

Recently, we've been experimenting with some improved mobile support on the www.seadragon.com website. There's no immediate plans to incorporate these experiments into our hosted Seadragon Ajax library or contribute to the open source version in the Ajax Control Toolkit. For our small team this is really just an issue of time, resources and priorities. Our current priority is continued experiments for forward looking features.

The iPhone touchscreen enhancements are using the documented Safari Javascript interfaces. Anyone is free to contribute enhancements to the open source project based on these platform specific browser extensions.

Bill Crow
Seadragon Group Manager
Microsoft Live Labs

For those who want to roll your own solution with Seadragon Ajax, we've got some really good news.

We're pleased to announce that a version of Seadragon Ajax is now available in source code as part of the ASP.Net Ajax Control Toolkit. This is distributed under Ms-PL, the open source compatible Microsoft Public License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms...).

You can find the ASP.Net Ajax Control Toolkit here: http://www.asp.net/ajax/AjaxControlTo...

Because this is released under Ms-PL, you can do pretty much anything you want with it: host it on your own site, modify it in any way you choose, or re-distribute it with your own custom solution. If you come up with some great enhancements, you can also contribute back to the open source project on Codeplex.

Bill Crow
Seadragon Group Manager
Microsoft Live Labs

We're pleased to announce that a version of Seadragon Ajax is now available in source code as part of the ASP.Net Ajax Control Toolkit. This is distributed under Ms-PL, the open source compatible Microsoft Public License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms...).

You can find the ASP.Net Ajax Control Toolkit here: http://www.asp.net/ajax/AjaxControlTo...

Bill Crow
Seadragon Group Manager
Microsoft Live Labs

You can find it at http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/li... or just go to www.seadragon.com and click on the Seadragon Ajax link at the bottom.

Bill Crow
Seadragon Group Manager
Microsoft Live Labs

This is straightforward to implement using (Seadragon-powered) Silverlight Deep Zoom. Multiple images can be encoded as a collection of Deep Zoom Images (DZI's.) This is known as a Deep Zoom Collection (DZC).

Silverlight Deep Zoom is designed to manage collections of images that can be smoothly and independently animated, including the ability to seamlessly fade in and out.

Seadragon Ajax offers only a subset of the capabilities provided by Silverlight Deep Zoom. Most notably, Seadragon Ajax ony handles single images (DZI's) not image collections (DZC's.)

Bill Crow
Seadragon Group Manager
Microsoft Live Labs

I've visited your site and I don't see any problem with zoom-to-mouse. It works fine. Are you using IE8B2 and are you viewing it full window mode? There is a known bug in IE8B2 that creates some rendering errors when Seadragon Ajax is in full window mode. This is fixed for an upcoming release of IE8. In the mean time, you may need to use Seadragon Ajax in the windowed mode only or not use the Beta2 release of IE8.

If this is not what's causing the problem, please let us know what browser you are using, if it happens in windowed mode or in the "full window" mode, and what your display resolution is.

Thanks!

Bill

Photosynth takes full advantage of the GPU on your video card to create that buttery-smooth display, typically at 60 frames per second. It would be very difficult to digitally capture that smooth motion in some video format, stored on the hard drive. So, the best way to make a great DVD slide show from Photosynth is to first select full screen mode on the Synth page (the little icon in the lower right of the window), then select full screen mode in your browser (press F11 if you're using Internet Explorer.) Put your camcorder on a tripod and point it at the display. Try to eliminate any stray light spilling onto the display and make sure its aligned squarely. Start recording and press the Photosynth "Play" button. PRESTO! You've captured a cool Photosynth presentation taking full advantage of the GPU to make a smooth and fluid video presentation. You can then use your favorite video editing software to polish it up and make it into a DVD.

Hi,

The buttery-smooth goodness of Seadragon is available now via the Deep Zoom feature in Microsoft Silverlight. This is the same technology as used in Photosynth, but re-implemented to remove the dependency on DirectX and the GPU. As a result, it only does 2D (no 3D) and the frame rate is a little slower. But it still provides the great zooming experience you've come to know and love in Photosynth.

Here are some examples:

http://memorabilia.hardrock.com
http://www.xrez.com/yosemite.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/bigweeken...
http://www.kbb.com/kbb/PerfectCarFind...
http://robburke.net/images/deeplol.html (Couldn't resist!)

If you're not a developer, you can also use PhotoZoom (http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com) to publish your photo collections with Silverlight Deep Zoom powered zoomable goodness.

Microsoft Expression Deep Zoom Composer lets you build custom Deep Zoom collections where you control the layout. You can publish from Deep Zoom Composer directly to PhotoZoom. The free beta is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/de...

So, there's lots of great Seadragon powered stuff from Microsoft and Microsoft Live Labs that's available now. And we're just getting started!

Bill Crow
Seadragon Group Manager
Microsoft Live Labs