I started playing around with SilverLight DeepZoom this evening, mostly using the JellyFish DZ tool on codeplex.  This certainly makes it easier to do the picture compositing type of stuff that a lot of people are doing right now like the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and the more recent Obama Headlines demo.

 

 

I really like how the SeaDragon technology really makes a super responsive UI and the zoom transitions are so smooth (way better than like what you get in virtual earth or other map apps).  But it got me thinking... beyond this type of deep exploration of a fairly static picutre, albeit a hyper-hires one, could this technology be used as some fundamental different way of navigating data (in more of a live/dynamic sense?)  Perhaps it's the MS Surface team with all their talk about NUI's (Natural User Interface's) that has me thinking like this, but I'm presently trying to brainstorm other "uses" for this technology.

 

So beyond the kind of boring "data-object model" navigation on the fly, I'm thinking of something like this.  Take one of my favorite old-school utilities, SpaceMonger, which looks like this:

This great app by the way, esentially displays the contents of your hard drive by visually representing the "space" that each item takes up so you can visually find the "mongering" size files.  It let's you "dive" into subfolders to see more and more details-- but as you can see, the graphics are not all that sexy.

 

Now enter SilverLight DeepZoom.  What if instead an app produced nice looking hi-res graphic outputs that were autostiched into a DZ browsable image?  That would kick ass.  And why stop there... let's go ahead and start back out at your network topology map, and let you zoom around and down INTO each server's or workstations HD?

 

Sounds cool, but obviously not trivial in work to produce.  But mark my words-- someone will build the app described above within the next year or two, I guarantee it. 

 

The areas around visualization of data is just now starting to pick up some serious steam with the new technologies available (driven concurrently with BI).  What other cool ideas can we come up with?