Seadragon Software

Last updated

Seadragon Software was a team within the Microsoft Live Labs. Its product, Seadragon, is a web optimized visualization technology that allows graphics and photos to be smoothly browsed, regardless of their size. Seadragon is the technology powering Microsoft's Silverlight, Pivot, Photosynth and the standalone cross-platform Seadragon application for iPhone and iPad.

Contents

Seadragon technology allows one to view extremely large and high resolution images without the loading time or latency typically associated with large images. The developers behind Seadragon also allow users to upload photos and create their own Seadragon style image to be viewed online.

History

Founded in 2003, the company that would eventually become Seadragon Software was originally named Sand Codex. Based in Princeton, New Jersey, Sand Codex moved to Seattle in 2004 to accommodate founder Blaise Agüera y Arcas's wife's new role at the University of Washington. [1]

In 2005 Sand Codex received $4 million in angel and venture capital funding, including $2 million from the Madrona Venture Group. [2] It was after this injection of capital that the company changed its name to Seadragon Software.

In early 2006, Seadragon Software was acquired by Microsoft [3] and organized within the newly formed Live Labs, a midpoint between Microsoft's online product groups and MSR, under Dr. Gary William Flake. [4]

Silverlight 2 released in 2008 with the Deep Zoom feature. This marked the first publicly shipped Seadragon software. [5] Seadragon made further contributions in Silverlight 3 and announced others for Silverlight 4.

Photosynth launched the summer of 2008; almost 2 years after its Community Technology Preview, the public can now create and view synths. The Photosynth team officially broke off from Seadragon to join MSN. [6]

Implementations

Seadragon Ajax is a pure JavaScript implementation of the Seadragon technology, released by Microsoft as an open-source library. It is now under active development as OpenSeadragon.

The Deep Zoom feature of Microsoft's Silverlight technology is an adaptation of Seadragon technology.

Seadragon Mobile was an iPhone app (no longer available) created from Seadragon technology. [7] [8]

How Seadragon works

Seadragon technology is based around two distinct platforms, one being Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, the other being Microsoft’s Silverlight with DeepZoom application. Using the Silverlight version requires that the user downloads the Microsoft Silverlight application. Alternatively, the AJAX version requires only the standard JavaScript web plug-ins available in most browsers and portable devices. AJAX technology has allowed for the increased interaction and rich user experiences which are typically characteristic of Web 2.0 enabled websites.

For the creation of Seadragon style content and images, when one uploads a picture, it is converted into a number of Deep Zoom Image (DZI) format files. These can be combined to make up a Deep Zoom Collection (DZC). These Deep Zoom Images create a digital tiled mosaic, of small (256x256) images, with each tile representing a portion or layer or set of pixels of the image at one specific resolution. This Deep Zoom format allows for only the pixels needed for a particular view on the screen to be loaded at one particular time – this results in a more effective use of bandwidth and computer resources. This also means that the amount of data needing to be transferred at any one time is proportional to the number of pixels on the screen. This is an alternative to loading all the pixels (data) of an image all at once with standard image formats. The figurative “secret sauce” behind Seadragon is the technology that allows for the seamlessly smooth transition between the tiles and layers amongst the DeepZoom collection (DZC) files that make up an image.

File format

All current implementations of Seadragon technology make use of the Deep Zoom Images, consisting of either a single Deep Zoom Image or a Deep Zoom Collection.

Examples

Related Research Articles

A rich web application is a web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software. The concept is closely related to a single-page application, and may allow the user interactive features such as drag and drop, background menu, WYSIWYG editing, etc. The concept was first introduced in 2002 by Macromedia to describe Macromedia Flash MX product. Throughout 2000-s, the term was generalized to describe web applications developed with other competing browser plugin technologies including Java applets, Microsoft Silverlight.

Bing Maps Web mapping service from Microsoft

Bing Maps is a web mapping service provided as a part of Microsoft's Bing suite of search engines and powered by the Bing Maps for Enterprise framework.

Photosynth

Photosynth is a discontinued app and service from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a model. Users are able to view and generate their own models using a software tool available for download at the Photosynth website.

Microsoft Silverlight Application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications

Microsoft Silverlight is a deprecated application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's own runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later versions supported multimedia, graphics, and animation, and gave support to developers for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight was also one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages using Silverlight did not run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there was no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.

Microsoft Live Labs Deepfish

Deepfish was an experimental browsing software system for Windows Mobile devices that used a zooming user interface, being developed at Microsoft Live Labs. It aimed to provide a consistent browsing experience on desktops and mobile devices, to display content on the small mobile displays in the same layout as larger displays, and to avoid the need to recode the web-page for small displays.

Comparison of the Java and .NET platforms.

MIX was a Microsoft conference held annually for web developers and designers at which Microsoft showcased upcoming web technologies. The conference was held each spring at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Unlike many of Microsoft's technical conference, MIX has been promoted more heavily to designers by inviting popular speakers from other popular web design conferences, such as SXSW, and has sponsored a CSS design contest each year to promote the conference. Microsoft has also used this conference as an opportunity to promote new web design and development tools such as Silverlight and Microsoft Expression Studio.

ThunderHawk

ThunderHawk is a discontinued web browser from Bitstream available for a full range of operating systems in high end and mass-market mobile phones and personal digital assistants. It is basically meant for mobile operators and original equipment manufacturers and not meant to download for normal users.

Microsoft Live Labs Volta

Volta is an experimental developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications, developed at Microsoft Live Labs. It allows developers to split their application easily into different client and server parts throughout the development lifecycle. Volta integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, supporting AJAX, JSON and more. It extends the .NET platform to software as a service (SaaS) applications, by using existing and familiar libraries, languages, tools, and techniques.

Windows Phone Family of mobile operating systems by Microsoft

Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design language. Unlike Windows Mobile, it was primarily aimed at the consumer market rather than the enterprise market.

Deep Zoom

Deep Zoom is a technology developed by Microsoft for efficiently transmitting and viewing images. It allows users to pan around and zoom in a large, high resolution image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by downloading only the region being viewed or only at the resolution it is displayed at. Subsequent regions are downloaded as the user pans to ; animations are used to hide any jerkiness in the transition. The libraries are also available in other platforms including Java and Flash.

Image Composite Editor

Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher made by the Microsoft Research division of Microsoft Corporation.

Microsoft Live Labs Pivot Data exploration tool by Microsoft

Pivot is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that allows users to interact with and search large amounts of data. It is based on Microsoft's Seadragon. It has been described as allowing users to view the web as a web rather than as isolated pages.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas Software engineer

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a software engineer, software architect, and designer. He is an authority in computer vision, machine intelligence, and computational photography and presents regularly at conferences. He appears regularly at TED and his presentations have been rated some of TED's "most jaw-dropping."

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich web applications that was actively developed and marketed by Microsoft from 2007 to 2012. This is a technical overview of the platform's history.

Mono (software) Computer software project

Mono is a free and open-source .NET Framework-compatible software framework. Originally by Ximian, it was later acquired by Novell, and is now being led by Xamarin, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the .NET Foundation. Mono can be run on many software systems.

ChronoZoom

ChronoZoom is a free open source project that visualizes time on the broadest possible scale from the Big Bang to the present day. Conceived by Walter Alvarez and Roland Saekow and developed by the department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Moscow State University, Alvarez unveiled the first ChronoZoom prototype at UC Berkeley's 2010 Faculty Research Lecture. Although that demo is no longer available to the public online, a second version rewritten in HTML5 is now available and open source. ChronoZoom was inspired by the study of Big History, and it approaches the documentation and visualization of time and history in the same way that Google Earth deals with geography. ChronoZoom allows users to see the true scale of time over cosmic, geologic, biological and social periods.

Microsoft mobile services are a set of proprietary mobile services created specifically for mobile devices, they are typically offered through mobile applications and mobile browser for Windows Phone, | platforms, BREW, and Java. Microsoft's mobile services are typically connected with a Microsoft account and often come preinstalled on Microsoft's own mobile operating systems while they are offered via various means for other platforms. Microsoft started to develop for mobile computing platforms with the launch of Windows CE in 1996 and later added Microsoft's Pocket Office suite to their Handheld PC line of PDAs in April 2000. From December 2014 to June 2015, Microsoft made a number of corporate acquisitions, buying several of the top applications listed in Google Play and the App Store including Acompli, Sunrise Calendar, Datazen, Wunderlist, Echo Notification Lockscreen, and MileIQ.

Windows Phone 7 First generation of Microsofts Windows Phone mobile operating system

Windows Phone 7 is the first release of the Windows Phone mobile client operating system, released worldwide on October 21, 2010, and in the United States on November 8, 2010. It runs on the Windows CE 6.0 kernel.

Test Studio

Telerik Test Studio is a Windows-based software testing tool for web and desktop functional testing, software performance testing, load testing and mobile application testing developed by Telerik. The tool ships with a plugin for Visual Studio and a standalone app that use the same repositories and file formats. Test Studio supports HTML, AJAX, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript and WPF. Test Studio supports test execution in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

References

  1. Peterson, Kim (2006-01-28). "The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft acquiring Seadragon Software". Seattletimes.nwsource.com. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  2. "Money flows for startups again". Seattlepi.com. 2005-07-26. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  3. Peterson, Kim (2006-02-15). "The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Seadragon, Microsoft close acquisition deal". Seattletimes.nwsource.com. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  4. "Microsoft announces Live Labs - and a call to action | ZDNet". Blogs.zdnet.com. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  5. "RedMonkTV » Brian Goldfarb on Silverlight 2.0 and Deep Zoom – Microsoft TechEd 2008". Redmonk.com. 2008-02-22. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  6. "Microsoft Live Labs Introduces Photosynth, a Breakthrough Visual Medium: Share more than photos; share an experience". Microsoft.com. 2008-08-20. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  7. "Microsoft releases first iPhone application, Seadragon". Engadget. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  8. "First Look: Seadragon Mobile". Microsoft Channel 9. Retrieved 2013-02-04.
  9. "Visualizing a Universe of Data: ChronoZoom". Microsoft Research. Microsoft. Retrieved 17 April 2011.