‘Seadragon Mobile’: Microsoft Live Labs’s iPhone app
Microsoft Live Labs becomes the first group inside the Redmond company to release an application for Apple's mobile phone. Seadragon Mobile, published to the App Store this afternoon, is a free demonstration program meant to test the viability of the high-tech Seadragon photo-display technology on mobile platforms.
FEATURES:
- View thousands of images over the air
- Quickly view massive gigapixel images
- Explore Photosynth collections in 2D, including your own
- Add your own PhotoZoom / Deep Zoom Composer content
- Subscribe to Deep Zoom RSS feeds
"The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit)," Daley explained. "Most phones out today don’t have accelerated graphics in them The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn’t just pick up a Blackberry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support."
This is a really great step forward for popularizing multi-resolution image formats and opening up a whole new vector in interface design. As a former member of the team you can read my take on where this is heading over at http://8ninths.com/?p=686