Sony's new High Res image zooming

[nightshade]

Didn't know where exactly to put this, thought it belonged here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LIdPOZGoDE&eurl

What you think ? I think its interesting.
And what possibly could he mean by saying that they will make this available to game devs in the future ?

 

[idsn6]

It's a pretty standard quadtree implementation with some logic for media triggers, along the lines of Seadragon/Megatexture/etc.

 

[Arwin]

I'd like to see them develop this technology into a good Browser together with Google Chrome's team, and see how well this could work with the new motion controller as well.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Can somebody explain inwords what is in that video?
Can't watch right now !

 

[Nesh]

Imagine a web page that can be zoomed "infinitely" and find other smaller webpages within a webpage, within another webpage and so forth.

To make it clearer, imagine that the top webpage is the universe. When you zoom in to the universe you find galaxies. If you zoom within a galaxy, you see stars and other solar systems. If you zoom within a solar system, you see planets. If you zoom withing a planet you see countries, if you zoom withing countries, you see cities, if you zoom......

 

[sir doris]

Can't see the vids at the moment, but this sounds a lot like something MS's live labs demo'd a few years ago.

I think the start of the video below contains the demo with an online paper and adverts and then a novel, but as I can't check it could be something else

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

 

[Arwin]

Yeah, that's quite similar, though I don't know if there's a whole tree behind the MS thing, that wasn't as clear - it seemed as that was limited to just zooming in into high res data for a long time until you reach the end of its resolution, and image only. The Sony technology seems to link in new data virtually endlessly, including movies.

What's interesting is that they mention it can do authoring, and in that context the demo they give is interesting - you see a calendar, and it almost seems that you can zoom in on different kind of product releases that they do on the calendar days (and then zoom in on the products in those announcements, and then get to see additional content - I liked the zooming in on a mosquito in someone's cheek in a picture and if you zoomed in close enough you seemed to get a pop-up for a commercial for mosquito-repellant or something)

So it really looks like a web browser, but instead of links you basically see a tiny version of the linked content that you can zoom in on.

 

[idsn6]

The algorithm is exactly the same. Everything else, like the movie and the popup and the loop, is trivial.

 

[BoardBonobo]

It looks pretty swish. I like the concept of a 3D browsing experience along with the augmented reality includes. I'd be more than happy browsing the web with something like that!

 

[Simon F]

I'd be more than happy browsing the web with something like that!

As long as it's obvious that there is something of interest when you zoom in, otherwise it'll become like one of those "point and click" adventure games where you end up clicking every damned pixel trying to find something that does something interesting.

 

[Rolf N]

Can somebody explain inwords what is in that video?
Can't watch right now !

Sparse mip-mapping.

 

[Asher]

It looks completely identical to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepZoom

 

[Phil]

As long as it's obvious that there is something of interest when you zoom in, otherwise it'll become like one of those "point and click" adventure games where you end up clicking every damned pixel trying to find something that does something interesting.

OMG, imagine next gen porn!!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Looks swish (like the MS example from ages back) but at the end of the day, it's a simple cosmetic variation to the existing system. Every piece of content being zoomed into could instead be described as an image with a link. Instead of zooming into the page, it opens the page full size. Same difference though.

 

[idsn6]

ZUIs have been around for a while. Mainly relegated to research and toy applications.

 

[patsu]

Yes, the tech has been around for a long time.

It really depends on how vendors apply them. I think the Seadragon + PhotoSynth spartial example is great. The only challenge is the tool to stitch these images together into a coherent whole. The speaker suggested that a community of people can organize related photos in meaningful ways. I like the combined idea much better compared to just standalone Seadragon or GigaPan.

Sony showed a simpler time-based organization in CEDEC 2009 (Everyone knows how to organize new data in a calendar). In their context, it would be a good start to simplify the TV remote UI. I always find scroll bar hard to use on a TV. They may be able to adapt GigaPan + gestures/head-tracking to navigate TV channels, my own home photos and videos, or over the Playstation Earth app.