In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ee) is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different documents. Information elements appear directly on an infinite virtual desktop (usually created using vector graphics), instead of in windows. Users can pan across the virtual surface in two dimensions and zoom into objects of interest. For example, as you zoom into a text object it may be represented as a small dot, then a thumbnail of a page of text, then a full-sized page and finally a magnified view of the page.
ZUIs use zooming as the main metaphor for browsing through hyperlinked or multivariate information. Objects present inside a zoomed page can in turn be zoomed themselves to reveal further detail, allowing for recursivenesting and an arbitrary level of zoom.
When the level of detail present in the resized object is changed to fit the relevant information into the current size, instead of being a proportional view of the whole object, it's called semantic zooming.[1]
Some consider the ZUI paradigm as a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI, being a Post-WIMP interface.[citation needed]
History
Ivan Sutherland presented the first program for zooming through and creating graphical structures with constraints and instancing, on a CRT in his Sketchpad program in 1962.[2]
A more general interface was done by the Architecture Machine Group in the 1970s at MIT. Hand tracking, touchscreen, joystick, and voice control were employed to control an infinite plane of projects, documents, contacts, video and interactive programs. One of the instances of this project was called Spatial Dataland.[3]
Another GUI environment of the 70's, which used the zooming idea was Smalltalk at Xerox PARC, which had infinite desktops (only later named such by Apple Computer), that could be zoomed in upon from a birds eye view after the user had recognized a miniature of the window setup for the project.
GeoPhoenix, a Cambridge, MA, startup associated with the MIT Media Lab, founded by Julian Orbanes, Adriana Guzman, Max Riesenhuber, released the first mass-marketed commercial Zoomspace in 2002–03 on the Sony CLIÉpersonal digital assistant (PDA) handheld, with Ken Miura of Sony
In 2002, Pieter Muller extended the Oberon System with a zooming user interface and named it Active Object System (AOS).[7] In 2005, due to copyright issues, it was renamed to Bluebottle, and in 2008, to A2.
In 2006, Hillcrest Labs introduced the HoME television navigation system, the first graphical, zooming interface for television.[8]
In 2007, Microsoft's Live Labs released a zooming UI for web browsing called Microsoft Live Labs Deepfish for the Windows Mobile 5 platform.
Apple's iPhone (premiered June 2007) uses a stylized form of ZUI, in which panning and zooming are performed through a touch user interface (TUI). A more fully realised ZUI is present in the iOS home screen (as of iOS 7), with zooming from the homescreen in to folders and finally in to apps. The photo app zooms out from a single photo to moments, to collections, to years, and similarly in the calendar app with day, month and year views.[9] It is not a full ZUI implementation since these operations are applied to bounded spaces (such as web pages or photos) and have a limited range of zooming and panning.
Franklin Servan-Schreiber founded Zoomorama, based on work he did at the Sony Research Laboratories in the mid-1990s. The Zooming Browser for Collage of High Resolution Images was released in Alpha in October 2007. Zoomorama's browser is all Flash-based. In 2010, project development ended, but many examples are still available on the site.
From 2008 to 2010, GNOME Shell used a zooming user interface for virtual workspaces management.[10] This ZUI was eventually replaced by a different, scrolling-based design.
In 2017, bigpictu.re offers an infinite (pan and zoom) notepad as a web application based on one of the first ZUI open-source libraries.[11]
In 2017, Zircle UI was released. It is an open source UI library that uses zoomable navigation and circular shapes.[12]
In 2022, the Miro collaboration platform, what is a zooming user interface, reported 40 million users. It was released in 2011 as RealtimeBoard and in 2019 rebranded as Miro.
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation. In many applications, GUIs are used instead of text-based UIs, which are based on typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard.
The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that define the WIMP "window, icon, menu and pointing device" paradigm.
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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human–computer interaction:
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↑ "Sigma lenses: focus-context transitions combining space, time and translucence", Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2008
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