Microsoft's Live Labs has released its Seadragon application -- which enables users to "deep zoom" into gigapixel-size images -- for Apple's iPhone. Live Labs says:
Seadragon Mobile brings the same smooth image browsing you get on the PC to the mobile platform. Get super-close in on a map or photo, with just a few pinches or taps of your finger. Browse an entire collection of photos from a single screen. You can browse Deep Zoom Images that you can create from your own pictures or your Photosynth collection (or anybody else's).
It also has a video of developer Ben Vanik talking about it.
Why the iPhone? Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, told Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog:
"The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit)," Daley explained. "Most phones out today don't have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn't just pick up a Blackberry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support."
He forgot to mention that he couldn't just pick up a Windows Mobile phone either….
Seadragon is used in Silverlight and in Microsoft's Photosynth, which allows users to take a group of photographs and stitch them together. I blogged about its release in August. Photosynth only runs on Windows XP (SP2 or SP3) and Windows Vista at the moment.
