TED (Technology, Education, Design) posted a video from a presentation given by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, showing off two new visualization tools Microsoft is developing. The first, Seadragon, looks like it allows for greatly enhanced photo and textual zooming (and the speed of doing so appears to keep up – no matter the resolution!). This technology has been worked into a perhaps, even more impressive application called Photosynth, which grabs images of a given object (say anything tagged ‘Duke Chapel’ for example) and stitches them together to create a photo-realistic three-dimensional exploration of the object.
Here’s the link to the video (which is the last of the three on the page) if the embedded video doesn’t play below.
Demo videos and more information are available (though they’re PC only…boo!): More on Seadragon here. More on Photosynth here. The BBC also has a mini-site with many examples.
Here is a cool link of this Photosynth collaborating with the University of Washington Animation Research Labs: https://phototour.cs.washington.edu/