I've been looking for additional detail on Deep Zoom, a new Silverlight feature and the subject of one of the coolest demos shown in the MIX08 keynote: Hard Rock Memorabilia 2.0, a photo montage of rock and roll items found at Hard Rock restaurants, hotels and casinos around the world. The Memorabilia page presents 258 items -- instruments, letters, wardrobe pieces, public records and more -- which you can then zoom in on (and I do mean "zoom in") for a look at the details, say, of Eric Clapton's guitar (try it; the detail is incredible). The total number of photos required to allow the "zooming" to take place is huge, of course. I don't know the number, but would like to.

James Brown poster, up close.

In my search for more detail, a quick hallway talk with Chris Bowen and Bob Familiar of Microsoft this morning finally pointed the way. Here's what I know. To display at photo montage in Silverlight, you'll need a new control that ships with Silverlight 2, the MultiScaleImage control. I trust it's in Beta 1, but haven't had time to look.

To package an image collection for display by the MultiScaleImage control you'll want to use a utility made available yesterday by the Expression team: the so called Deep Zoom Composer. The Expression Team has also just published a Deep Zoom Composer User's Guide, which I also recommend.

What's the point of the feature? The authors of the User's Guide say:

"Anyone who is interested in using Silverlight 2 to take advantage of the zooming, panning, and display of really large images that, without this technology, would be very difficult to achieve over standard broadband connections. This tool is targeted for a very general audience. There are several common uses of this technology. Mapping is one , another major use of this technology might be in online banner ads where this technology is used to provide very interactive, detailed views of a particular product."

The underlying technology, by the way, is from the Live Labs SeaDragon, an acquisition made by Microsoft Research over a year ago, and first demoed last year at O'Reilly's ETech conference as the driver of Photosynth, an amazing visualization tool (See "Microsoft's Shiny New Toy," Technology Review March-April 2008). Sea Dragon is also at the heart of another product, Deepfish, a mobile browser still available, apparently, only as a technology preview.