Seadragon Software: Images Demo
This video is the only remaining demo video from Sand Codex's original Seadragon website, prior to their acquisition by Microsoft Live Labs: http://web.archive.org/web/2005093022...
From their demos page:
"Seadragon is a technology designed for advanced graphical client-server or peer-to-peer interaction. The client side presents the user with a visual workspace in which many kinds of objects can be accessed, viewed, and interacted with. The objects may represent local or remote documents or applications. Seadragon's main innovation is in the way it unifies streaming transmission, rendering, and navigation, leading to excellent performance and near-optimal bandwidth efficiency, even for objects of infinite complexity.
This seeming paradox is achieved through the use of random-access, multiresolution compressed data structures. The new JPEG2000 ISO standard is a perfect example of such a structure, and is in fact used in our technology for representing and streaming still digital images. Plain JPEG2000 cannot effectively represent large texts, vector graphics, or applets, however. Seadragon has developed novel extensions of the ISO format to represent these other document types.
The streetmap demo illustrates this: over a low bandwidth (128 kilobit/second) connection, the user is able to view a vector map -- on the server, a 323MB document -- almost instantly. Through continuous navigation by zooming and panning, the user can focus in on details, which then literally "come into focus" as the relevant information is streamed from the server. Visual content is spatially seamless and refines gradually, avoiding jarring perceptural discontinuities. The burden on the server and the navigation performance of the client are independent of the document's size or complexity.
Other demo videos illustrate the application of the same technology to other types of objects, including pure text, applets, and digital photos. The text example allows the user to navigate through the entire content of James Joyce's Ulysses; the photo examples show navigation through rearrangable groups of high-resolution images. These images can be hundreds of megapixels in size and tens of thousands of such images can be viewed simultaneously."