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Seadragon and Zooming Interfaces
By Jacob Cohen | May 11, 2007
Jeff Atwood has written a blog entry about Zoomable interfaces, including an image of Microsoft’s Seadragon product as an example. The other examples in his post are mostly concerned with the ability to zoom in and out for finer grained control or higher-level operations.
I think Seadragon is the most intriguing example, and has the potential for using the “zoom” function as more than a means for adjusting the scope of what you’re operating on.
When you’re navigating the web, the relationship between pages is basically a graph. In this presentation, the size of each page shown is inversely proportional to the weight of the path from the current page to that page.
Since web page graphs typically have cycles, you can get a sort of fractal effect as you navigate to sub pages, and then to more sub pages. Each “zoom” operation effectively moves you along an edge of the graph and adjusts the weights of the paths to nearby nodes, creating a new set of preview images of varying sizes.
Update: after viewing the full video of Aza Raskin’s presentation, which includes a bit on zoomable interfaces, I’m not sure what point he is trying to prove. Early on, he says that hierarchies are inherently bad, and that we should not try to organize and categorize our data, because it is inherently non-scalable. Yet when he looks at the idea of zoomable interfaces, he is advocating exactly the opposite. The data is extremely hierarchical, and the “zoom” feature navigates up and down the levels of the hierarchy.
