Way cool that PhotoZoom was announced a few days ago as usual Liveside got the scoop.

One of the first things I did when I moved to Redmond was a Steve Ballmer keynote demo @ Worldwide Partner Conference. Some sizzle we added to that keynote was to visualize a 60,000x30,000 pixel image in a web page (served from Silverlight Streaming).

We were using WAY EARLY versions of Deep Zoom back then it was known as SilverDragon aka Silverlight with SeaDragon Zooming Technology. It is now baked into the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 runtime.

Matt Augustine built PhotoZoom which consumes one or many photos, crunches the images, packages and uploads to Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live.

Its a really cool piece of technology.

Here is the one paragraph overview:

PhotoZoom is an experimental project developed by a small group of Microsoft developers, and it is definitely not an official, supported Microsoft product.  Also, I cannot make any guarantees that it will be operational at all times, that it will support a large number of users, etc.  This is not an official Microsoft press release and I am not a spokesperson.  I can’t make any suggestions about future Microsoft product releases related to this technology or concept.  In other words, I hope people will have fun with it, but please set your expectations accordingly.

 

Why is this relevant to Windows Live Platform?

To store and serve the images Deep Zoom creates takes a lot of space and a lot of bandwidth. Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live can offset that bandwidth and storage requirement as it is all stored in the cloud.

What to see it working?

Check out or see below is an iframe of the application created - you need Silverlight 2 Beta 1 to run it - and this is from my Panoramic collection from Windows Live Spaces

UPDATE: Check out Mary Jo Foley's post