14 DAY TRIAL // Seadragon and Photosynth are simultaneously two technologies and two projects from Microsoft Live Labs designed to irremediably change digital imaging management and viewing, both on a local computer and online. Essentially, Microsoft has set up to build an imaging social meta-universe. The Seadragon and Photosynth technologies will contribute to create connections across all social networking spaces and to Hyperlink all Internet shared images together with the additional metadata. And in the end, the users will be able to seamlessly navigate the multidimensional spaces created by Seadragon and Photosynth, with no other limitation that the actual number of pixels on their screen.
"Seadragon is an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data. And it doesn't matter how much information we are looking at, how big the collections are or how big the images are, it does not make any difference because the only thing that can limit the performances of this system at any given time is the number of pixels on your screen" Blaise Aguera y Arcas explained.
Just watch the video at the bottom to get an idea of what Microsoft is building. And keep in mind that this goes well beyond a simple three-dimensional digital photography service or a megapixel panoramic imaging viewer or a high definition image browser. It is more than digital imaging manipulation, meta-tagging, editing and experiencing, it is a new social networking dimension, with Seadragon at its core. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the man in the video at the bottom, is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs and the co-creator of Photosynth and the father of Seadragon.
"Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects, performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen, transitions are smooth as butter, and scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution," are the promised Microsoft is delivering with Seadragon, informing that "the Seadragon team is currently tuning its DirectX implementation, making the most of the new Windows Media Photo format, and cranking on the Photosynth Technology Preview."