Posts Tagged ‘Deepzoom’

Silverlight on Xbox

Monday, July 6th, 2009

A few weeks ago Microsoft announced that their Silverlight platform was coming to the Xbox.  Strangely they made this announcement at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, talking about Silverlights ability to deliver interactive advertising media.  Whilst it can undoubtedly do this, I can’t help thinking that the advertising theme isn’t the whole story – if it is then it’s a huge waste of potential.

Here’s my thinking… If an update to Xbox firmware brings native support for Silverlight to the dashboard it opens up a huge amount of new functionality. 

For one thing Silverlight would offer the Xbox a proven media streaming platform.  Now this aspect may well be related to the advertising announcement.  MS clearly want the Xbox to a platform for video streaming, whether that be though the Netflix linkup or their partnership with Sky in the UK.  Silverlight could do the streaming and as well as tying in the context sensitive ads that the agencies would love.  Past the ads though, MS’s streaming tech seems to work very well indeed – hence it’s use by many major sporting events like Wimbledon and the Olympics. 

Silverlight would also automatically bring support for cool technology like the SeaDragon based DeepZoom and Photosynth.  Whilst these may seem like eye candy, in the context of a living room they would work very well indeed, especially when combined with a Natal interface.  I can imagine a panning around a photo album and zooming in and out of pictures all though gestures.  I reckon it would really work.

But what else could it bring?  How about an app store?  I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I reckon the Xbox is crying out for one.  Silverlight would offer a relatively lightweight environment for people to write small apps, and in the marketplace they have the makings of a system for monetising those apps.  Now I could be talking nonsense, but I think that would be really exciting.  The iPhone is a great platform, but I’d love to see what sort of things people would come up with given an Xbox and a big screen TV to play with.  Hell I might even get the TED app I mentioned months ago! :)

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Seadragon makes it to iPhone

Monday, December 15th, 2008

iPhone Seadragon view on a Photosynth setiPhone Seadragon zoom into a Photosynth setiPhone Seadragon zoom into a Photosynth set

I’m probably a bit late with this news but I noticed at the weekend that Microsoft have released an iPhone application for their Seadragon technology.

I’ve posted about Seadragon and it’s partner in crime Photosynth quite a lot in the past so I won’t go into detail about the technology itself (try here and here for that), but the iPhone application does go some way to showing the potential Seadragon has.

At the moment the app is able to access content from the Photosynth site, any Seadragon RSS feed (though I’m yet to work out what these are…) and any DeepZoom composer files.  It also comes with access to some example content such as maps – which interestingly also use the iPhones location awareness to show your position on them.

Whilst the app does a good job, I’d hope and suspect that it’s very much our first view of things to come.  At the moment for example although the app can open images from PhotoSynth ’synths’, it doesn’t present them in their full 3D glory.  Hopefully in future this functionality will be added as it would seem to suit the Smartphone/iPhone form factor and interface perfectly.

I’m also interested to see what the Seadragon RSS feeds are.  I’ve not had a good look into it yet, but I can’t see anything about them on Seadragon.com.  I’d imaging they are similar to the RSS feeds you can import into PhotoZoom.  Hopefully I’ll be able to point it into my flickr account and it’ll Seadragon up my pictures!

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Silverlight 2.0 Released

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Today MS have released Silverlight 2.0 out of beta.  Great news for me as I can now get it rolled out at work and get people trying out things like PhotoSynth and DeepZoom (we can’t really deploy betas!).  I’m really looking forward to seeing how people might use them. 

The installation is here and is available for PC and Mac and supports IE, Firefox and Google Chrome. 

An interesting note from the release material is that it seems like Apple are blocking a release for iPhone… I guess it gets in the way of their own plans?  What with Silverlight on its way to Windows Mobile and Nokia, and WM Mesh clients on their way too, I’m going to feel a little left out with my iPhone.

Given MS’s current marketing campaign if I were them I’d be tempted to build iPhone compatible clients anyway.  Then I’d show them working as much as possible and let Apple publicly deny them to users…

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Newfangled modern computers.

Monday, July 28th, 2008

I was just going through my RSS feeds and spotted a post from Laughing Squid about a video IBM commissioned in 1968 as a glossary of computer terms.

I was going to send it as a joke to a mate of mine who’s doing something similar, but having watched it I was surprised that it’s all still more or less accurate.  Not sure why it surprised me, after all the basic principles are all still the same.  I guess I still think of this stuff as being modern!  It’s easy to forget that we’re not really doing anything new… we’re just doing in differently.  Hell, before computers people managed and organised data and information quite happily for centuries.

Oh… and there’s a nice bit of early DeepZooming in there too!


A computer glossary or, coming to terms with the data processing machine from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

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Hyperlinks in Deepzoom

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

I’ve just been playing with Deepzoom as a way of publishing some information I’ve been working on over the past few weeks.  It’s a very powerful tool and it’s giving me a great way of publishing every level of detail – whatever the intended audience – in one place.  I’ll try to strip out the company specific stuff and put an example on here at some point.

Anyways… the question I have is, does anyone know if it is (or will be) possible to embed hyperlinks into Deepzoom?  There are a few times where it would have been useful to be able to link out to related word docs.  I’m only using the beta composer tool at the moment so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance! 

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Geotagging Photos

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

There’s a good post over on the MS Digital Memories Experience blog about how you can use the various Windows Live tools to add Geotags to photos without the need for GPS.   It’s then followed with another post about linking your photos to a tour within Live Search Maps.

It got me thinking… That’s pretty cool stuff, and well done to those guys for putting it all together, but something that does all of that in a more integrated way would be so much nicer.  I’m a fan of Live Photo Gallery and given there are so many other Geotagging tools out there it would seem like a great thing to add to this ’software’ part of the Live ’service’.  Given MS’s other mapping and virtual earth tools this shouldn’t be a too hard to integrate (can you tell I don’t do development?!).

What I’d really like to see though are the things like Photosynth and Deepzoom.  Photosynth still impresses the hell out me, and I can’t wait to see it working in a product form.  I’ve used it in some demos at work as an example of what sort of technology we can look forward to and it always seems to capture peoples imaginations.  Everyone can think up a use for it.  Hopefully something will appear before too long. 

Having played with the PhotoZoom site a little I reckon that would be another good addition to Live Photo Gallery.  It’d certainly be a good example of Software + Services – click a button on your desktop and MS processes your photos in the background.  Quite what format they’d be delivered in I’m not sure, perhaps similar to what’s on the site now, an object you can paste into an email or website.  Sounds good to me.

Anyway… enough rambling from me. 

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