14 DAY TRIAL // Seadragon and Surface are two illustrations of technologies developed by Microsoft which can combine to deliver unique results. An example is the video embedded at the bottom of this article courtesy of Eric Havir, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing at Microsoft Surface. Albeit a tad old, the video from the Microsoft ProPhoto Summit went live on September 25, and reveals the integration between Seadragon and Microsoft Surface, an integration as natural as the user interface of the Redmond company's first commercial example of surface computing.
“Back in June, we met up with Bill Crow at LiveLabs to show bloggers Seadragon on Surface. Bill had some great content, including some initial content from the Yosemite Extreme Panorama Project. Then in July I met up with Bill again to look at Seadragon on Surface. This time he was at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit showing an excellent Seadragon compilation of the photos from the project,” Havir stated.
Seadragon is yet to be made available to the general public, as it remains an incubation project with Microsoft Live Labs. However, technology from Seadragon has indeed made it into additional products developed by the Redmond giant, some of them already available. In this regard, both Photosynth and Silverlight Deep Zoom feature the bits and pieces from Seadragon. If you want the same hands-on experience as the one featured in the Seadragon and Silverlight video, minus the touch-computing capabilities of course, you can visit the Yosemite Extreme Panorama Project and navigate the 20 multi mega pixel panoramic images made available with the help of a mouse and Silverlight Deep Zoom.
“The aim of Seadragon is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network,” reads Microsoft's official description of Seadragon.