First off, I know this is a bit old, but amazingly I missed the boat the first time this was displayed. Microsoft Seadragon is one of the coolest new technologies that some of you have never heard of. First, this is what Microsoft’s Official Seadragon page has to say about it:
Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.
They follow that up by telling you that it is pretty vague, but they ask you to “consider the following four ‘promises’ of Seadragon:”
1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
3. Transitions are smooth as butter.
4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.
The Seadragon team is currently tuning its DirectX implementation, making the most of the new Windows Media Photo format, and cranking on the Photosynth Technology Preview.
Now, I’ll be the first to tell you that Photosynth impresses the hell out of me (click here to see a video of it in action), but what Seadragon is capable of excites me a bit more. So, what in the world is Microsoft Seadragon? Well, why don’t you take a look at this video. In a nutshell, Seadragon will allow you to view data and pictures in such a way that you’re only limited to the size of the display… you really need to see the video to get a grasp of what it can do!
Speaking of amazing things you can do with images… have any of you heard of Content-Aware Image Resizing? Once perfected it’ll be a great tool that you can use to resize pictures without having to crop or majorly distort them. From onOne Software’s press release:
Liquid Resize, a “content aware” image resizing application, was originally developed by the Vienna, Austria based husband-wife team of Ramin Sabet and Irmgard Sabet-Wasinger and is based on the work of Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir that made its first appearance in a video released at Siggraph 2007.
Liquid Resize will allow users to resize an image without the traditional geometric limitations while minimizing any distortion that would typically result from changing the original aspect ratio of an image.
This is another “see it to beleive it” things, so please watch the video demo here. That is something that, as a photographer, I’d really love to see made public! They claim to have a Beta out soon, but it’s already 2 months overdue so I won’t be holding my breath. If any more news breaks about any of these incredible new applications, expect to read about it right here!
