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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