14 DAY TRIAL // Hard rock is without a doubt an expression of art that has found its place in music history. And at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft brought its own rock 'n' roll to the table via a collaboration with Hard Rock. This year's Microsoft's Web developer and designer conference was indeed centered on Internet Explorer 8, but at the same time Silverlight managed to steal a part of the show. In this context, Microsoft announced a new Silverlight-based experience that is now available to end users, namely "Hard Rock Memorabilia 2.0." Via the webpage featuring the memorabilia and Silverlight, visitors will be able to enjoy examples from the extensive 70,000 items of Hard Rock's collection of rock 'n' roll memorabilia.
"Hard Rock is always looking for innovative ways to allow more fans to experience the rock 'n' roll history it represents," revealed Sean Dee, Hard Rock's chief marketing officer. "But of course the memorabilia is extremely valuable and difficult to move, so we wanted to find a more practical way to bring the collection to a broader audience around the world. With Silverlight, we were able to build an application that allows us to make our collection accessible and highly interactive for millions of fans worldwide."
The Hard Rock Memorabilia webpage was put together by Vertigo and takes advantage of the DeepZoom feature added to Silverlight 2. "The user experience is turned upside-down," stated Vertigo CEO Scott Stanfield. "This was a big, big jump in terms of what we can create and offer to our clients and their users. We're down to the grain of leather on somebody's jacket or the individual wire wraps on the 'E' string of a guitar. You can see inside Buddy Holly's glasses and see the inscription from the manufacturer."
At the bottom of this article, you will be able to find an embedded video that will provide you with additional details about Silverlight's DeepZoom. Additionally, you can also develop similar DeepZoom solutions now via a Preview of the Deep Zoom Composer released just after MIX08.
"DeepZoom [is] a new Silverlight feature based on the Seadragon research project that provides scalable image zooming - you can take a 2 billion pixel image, and zoom right into it without downloading gigabytes of pixel data locally. You can also use this to filter many images and navigate around them. Showing how this is used for the Hard Rock website to navigate throughout their memorabilia. If you're wondering how you create a DeepZoom experience, we're shipping a tool this week to allow you to import and prepare DeepZoom images," said Tim Sneath, Microsoft resident group manager for client platforms.