P+Z precursor: Photosynth & Seadragon

Still for context : 2007, one year after Jeff Han’s talk, this one drove the nail further. Zooming into data is clearly intuitive and powerful. I remember seeing that car ad and feeling totally validated about the project I was working on then. Zooming lets you go from general to detail in an instant and back again just as easily if you realise you’re not looking in the right place, or if you simply changed your mind...

One difficulty is apparent here, though: the demo works because the speaker already knows where everything is when, in a more likely scenario, he should be exploring... The solution is to provide different Levels of Detail depending on the pixels available to represent an area, ie to avoid showing thousands of tiny thumbnails, you provide some classification and show summary placeholders instead : if you’re interested, just zoom to see more !

I’m still not sure why the products presented here didn’t take on. Technology evolves in mysterious ways...