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BMNG SilverLight 2.0 Beta Deep Zoom

posted by lxnyce on Friday March 07, @12:40PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the Cool-but-why dept.
Microsoft Web Mapping
From the GIS in XML blog : "One of the many announcements at the MIX08 conference is the availability of Deep Zoom technology for Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1. This results from an R&D program in Microsoft called Sea Dragon. Sea Dragon was evidently a Microsoft acquisition awhile back. Reminiscent of Keyhole(now google earth), Sea Dragon is a tool for smooth viewing of very large image resources. The novelty is to have it useable inside a SilverLight browser view."

For links to a live demonstration of Silverlight and more info on the Blue Marble project, visit the GIS in XML blog.
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Another Deep Zoom GIS experiment unfolded today. This time, it's from the GIS in XML blog. From the blog's summary : "Just to show that I can serve a compiled Deep Zoom Silverlight app from various Apache servers I loaded this Denver example on a Windows 2003 Apache Tomcat here: http://www.web-demographics.com/Denver, and then a duplicate on a Linux Ubuntu7.10 running as an instance in the Amazon EC2, this time using Apache httpd not Tomcat: http://www.gis-ows.com/Denver Remember these are using beta technology and will requires updating to Silverlight 2.0. The Silverlight install is only about 4.5Mb so the install is relatively painless on a normal bandwidth connection."

For a live demonstration, as well as a very highly detailed link, please visit the GIS in XML blog.
BMNG SilverLight 2.0 Beta Deep Zoom | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 5 comments | Search Discussion
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  • A step backwards

    (Score:3, Interesting)
    by lxnyce (1043) on Friday March 07, @01:11PM (#2222)
    ( http://www.vizure.com/ )
    I fail to see why we are going this direction. Number one, we have flash which can do the same thing. Check out : http://www.flashearth.com/ [flashearth.com]

    The resolution of the images such as Google's Aerial photo's are essentially close to 1Billion x 1Billion pixels. Notice you get the smooth zoom in/out, with blending and rotation. Why are we willing to create yet another flash like standard, when what we really need is a web based 3D standard. Look into the Firefox Canvas3D tags : http://wiki.mozilla.org/Canvas:3D [mozilla.org] There is already an implementation that exists, although it's still an early beta.

    Introducing a 2D canvas that does pretty much nothing, is a huge step backwards. You can do what "SilverLight" is giving you all through ajax. It won't be as smooth and fluent, but you won't be required to install something on your machine. Even the functionality of SilverLight isn't unique. It's nothing but a simple 2D catalog viewer that anyone with a little experience can write in probably less than a week.

    In the old slashdot vain...
    1. Build pyramid layers on imagery [or for MSFT, convert to a proprietary format]
    2. Build a nested catalog that is good at managing memory footprints and toggling images when out of visible distance (a file directory is a good example of this)
    3. Build it on top of a proprietary renderer (DirectX)
    4. ...
    5. Profit


    Give me one week and I can have the same thing running with an OpenGL app and also in an Ajax web application.
    [ Reply to This ]

    • Re:A step backwards

      (Score:3)
      by Satri (3) on Friday March 07, @05:46PM (#2224)
      ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )
      I can't tell you much about my SilverLight experience. Mine is short so far: went to Canada's national news website (radio-canada.ca), when trying to listen to an archived show, I was asked to install SilverLight, I did this, it seemed to install properly, then after restart tried to see the show, silverlight somehow starts but no video is shown. Failure. I'm not bitching, I understand this is a version 1.0 (well, 1.03xx actually) and things will get better, but hey, how come can't I see media on my national news network? This isn't great. Maybe there's a workaround, maybe messing with the plugin and doing some file-magic will fix things, but this isn't supposed to be required in my opinion. I expect that kind of software to work well enough right away. With open source software, when things go wrong (because they do), I can blame myself amongst others because I can actually improve it, which isn't the case with proprietary software which leaves me only with groans (and bug reports that may never be seriously attended to).

      As for your "yet another duplicated tool", I'm not sure Microsoft are "worst" than others. Apple, Adobe, Google etc. are all doing this to some extent... That's why open (and flexible) standards are valuable.
      [ Reply to This | Parent ]

  • More info

    (Score:3, Informative)
    by lxnyce (1043) on Friday March 07, @01:54PM (#2223)
    ( http://www.vizure.com/ )
    Looks like I am not alone : http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/0 3/07/1443208&from=rss [slashdot.org]
    [ Reply to This ]

  • Deep Zoom Sample Code

    (Score:2, Interesting)
    by Anonymous Voxel on Monday March 10, @03:36AM (#2225)

    Hey guys if your keen to see some smaple code of this in action I did some work over the weekend:

    http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/Blog/tabid/73/Entr yID/394/Default.aspx [soulsolutions.com.au]

    Essentially out of the box you don't get interactivity, I put together some code from various sources you can just download and put in your own images.

    If you didn't know there will be a Silverlight version of Virtual Earth released very soon with this technology. The difference between it and what is out there already? Fully supported, .net programming (choose your language), high performance, new tools.

    John.

    [ Reply to This ]

  • Re: A Step Backwards

    (Score:2, Funny)
    by adamhill (59) on Monday March 10, @01:25PM (#2226)
    Reminding me of the pre-Flash days.

    "Install a *1 megabyte* plugin in the browser. You are *insane*. No one is going to do that!!!"

    The more things change, the more they remain the same....
    [ Reply to This ]