Seadragon preview

This Thursday (October 25, 2007) is the 2nd Annual Chicagoland Innovation Summit, presented by Innovate Now. Microsoft is a sponsor and will have a large presence at the event. I will be on hand with several of my colleagues and we will be demonstrating some very forward looking technology that I feel is quite innovative. I thought it would be interesting to give a “sneak peek” of some of the technologies that we will be showcasing at the event. This is the second article, the first article was on Photosynth and is located here.

Disclaimer

This blog entry describes technology that is currently still in the labs environment. Microsoft’s intent with this type of technology is to build it into shipping products or services that are delivered to you. There are no timelines or product plans available at this time and there is always a chance that you may never see this technology in a shipping product.

What is Seadragon?

Seadragon is a technology that greatly enhances the viewing of images at different resolutions and different bandwidth speeds regardless of the capabilities of the device that it is being viewed on. I have talked with several people in the past couple of years about the quandary we are in with our devices: some of our devices are getting bigger and some are getting smaller and we want high quality on the device regardless of its size. I use the example of seeing a 12 Megapixel photo on a large widescreen HD TV versus seeing the same photo on your iPod or Zune. The Seadragon technologies will help to address this quandary.

Want to see it in action?

Currently there is not a public preview of Seadragon that you can interact with on the web. If you checked out the Photosynth preview, you have seen some of the Seadragon technology in action (it is part of the overall demonstration). There is a great video that shows a Seadragon preview from the most recent TED conference avaliable here. We will be demoing a Seadragon client application at the Chicagoland Innovation Summit.