14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Live Labs has once again put the technology behind Deep Zoom to good use, with the introduction of Zoom.it. The new free service is designed to simplify the manner in which customers view, create and sharing high-resolution imagery. The beauty about Zoom.it is that the Cloud application does all the heavy lifting for users. Zoom.it is capable of taking any image on the web and modify it with a Deep Zoom twist. The new content created by Zoom.it can be shared via a link, or embedded in websites.
“Zoom.it converts your image to the Deep Zoom format, which lets you smoothly and efficiently explore the whole image, no matter how large. Check out Deep Zoom Studio for examples of this technology in action. Zoom.it runs on Windows Azure and takes advantage of Microsoft Silverlight to provide the richest, most fluid zooming experience possible,” reads an excerpt out of the service’s description.
According to Microsoft, Zoom.it is on no way limited to actual images. The service is capable of dealing with additional file formats beyond those normally associated with images. In this regard, users will be able to leverage Zoom.it with PDF documents, SVGs files, as well as regular webpages.
At the same time, Live Labs has also put together an application programing interface (API) designed to allow users to take advantage of Zoom.it. “Our web API provides programmatic access to the Zoom.it service at api.zoom.it,” Live Labs stated. “It takes the URL to an image on the web and creates a Deep Zoom Image (DZI). You get the Zoom.it short URL, an embeddable viewer, as well as the underlying DZI and surrounding metadata.”
Of course, the Redmond company is also providing developers with a range of information related to Zoom.it. Devs can access guidance on how to get started, as well as information on the formats supported, references, and help libraries. “As always, please keep in mind that this is an experiment released by Live Labs and should not be depended upon in a production environment,” the software giant stated.
Follow me on Twitter @MariusOiaga.