Microsoft has released an app for the iPhone – Seadragon. Hang on, wasn’t this in the Book of Revelation, right after the bit with the seventh seal and the trumpets?
Seadragon is Microsoft’s rather impressive looking image manipulation tool (a part of the MS Photosynth project) that aims to provide seamless panning and zooming into enormous multi-gigapixel images. If that doesn’t mean a great deal, check out this rather impressive TED lecture and demo.
At the moment you will need a PC to create Photosynth images suitable for Seadragon browsing, although as all ‘Synths are public during the beta period there are a few available to play around with. You can pinch/zoom entire image libraries this way and the tech lends itself rather well to maps. I can see this being a good way to read graphic novels, assuming you can avoid the copyright issue.
Available now | free | Microsoft Live Labs
