DeepZoomPix: Experience Your Photos Like Never Before

DeepZoomPix is an exciting technology demo to show what happens when design and some cool technology is applied to an increasingly common scenario: viewing large collections of photos online.

We’ve all experienced it: someone sends you a link to their online photo gallery. You see a bunch of photos on the screen. They’re low resolution so that they load quickly. If you view them as a slideshow they take forever to load because the server has to retrieve a higher resolution version. Every time you want to look at another picture, you have to go back to a thumbnail view and click around with the mouse and wait for the page to reload.

DeepZoomPix is an attempt to turn this problem on its head by using Silverlight’s Deep Zoom technology and the Azure Services Platform: you upload your pictures or import them from Facebook, Flickr or an RSS feed and DeepZoomPix turns them into beautiful, interactive and tactile user experiences. You navigate the photo albums fluidly with your mouse, zooming in and out at will. Pages never reload and there are links to click. The experience feels seamless. You can send your albums by email or embed them into a web page or blog to share the experience with your friends.

Is DeepZoomPix a new consumer service for hosting and sharing images? No – it is a technology demo which we currently plan to keep going until the end of the year. We simply want to show what a designer and a developer can create relatively easily using our platform and tools.

So what’s the point of all this? If you’re an end user, we just want you to have fun and explore the richness of the interaction experience. If you’re a designer or a developer, we hope DeepZoomPix stimulates you into thinking about how you could use the technologies in DeepZoomPix to enhance your own projects. We’ve made available some resources to help get you started.