Photozoom

One of the most fascinating technologies showed at MIX08 was Deep Zoom, which was used in during the Hard Rock demo of their new Memorabilia site. It was a demo done right and the technology itself is pretty fascinating as well. Later during MIX the LiveLabs team opened up Photozoom, a new web service that allows you to create the same experience with your own fotos… and embed to you site/blog if you want.

Just like many other projects based on LiveLabs technology, this is a research project for now and not officially supported yet:

“PhotoZoom is an experimental project developed by a small group of Microsoft developers, and it is definitely not an official, supported Microsoft product. Also, I cannot make any guarantees that it will be operational at all times, that it will support a large number of users, etc. This is not an official Microsoft press release and I am not a spokesperson. I can’t make any suggestions about future Microsoft product releases related to this technology or concept. In other words, I hope people will have fun with it, but please set your expectations accordingly.”

Still an interesting evolution though so make sure you check it out. I can’t embed an album here (because WordPress.com doesn’t allow me) but here’s an album I just created with some pictures of the Grand Canyon. You will need Silverlight 2 beta 1 to make it work. Oh and by the time Photozoom is rolled out more publicly, I’m pretty sure the ‘logo’ will change as well ;)