Based on the Silverlight MultiScaleImage control, DeepZoom is the UI component that allows users to pan around and zoom in/out with mouse wheel, high resolution image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by downloading only the region being viewed and/or only at the resolution it is displayed at. Subsequent regions are downloaded as the user pans to (or zooms into them); animations are used to hide any jerkiness in the transition.
Although Ajax allows similar user experience as demonstrated in
Google Map and
Virtual Earth, the Silverlight experience is smoother because it's engine take better advantages of GPU.
Though DeepZoom has been used in imaging applications such as
PhotoZoom, there are also considerable interest in using it to
navigate business documents.
The easiest way to create DeepZoom image collection is with
DeepZoom Composer.
EditDeepZoom for navigating business documents
In order to use DeepZoom with business documents, there are also interests in generating DeepZoom image collection in batch or dynamically. The DeepZoom composer comes with a command line tool called SparseImageTool.exe that can be used to generate image collections in batch. The tools can be found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Corporation\Deep Zoom Composer is default installation location is used.
DeepEarth is an example for dynamically generated image collection. In fact, it is using the Virtual Earth image service.
In order to generate image collection from business documents, one has to convert them to images first. The following are some relavant works in the area:
EditOther deepzoom articles
Edit10/13/2008 version of DeepZoom Composer Bug!
If you download the
Oct. 13, 2008 version of DeepZoom Composer, make sure you update the DeepZoomProjectTestPage.html in the DeepZoom project template. Otherwise, it will direct your users to download Silver 2 beta 2 (2.0.30523.8) instead of Silverlight 2 RTW (2.0.31005.0). If you did the default installation, you can find the file at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Corporation\Deep Zoom Composer\DeepZoomProject\DeepZoomProjectWeb\ClientBin\DeepZoomProjectTesPage.html. Open the file with Notepad, locate the link side the object tag and replace it with:
<a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=115261" style="text-decoration: none;">
<img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108181" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style: none"/>
</a>