Zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs),
as they are known, are arriving on the coat-tails of touch-screen gadgets such
as the iPhone that have popularised zooming to magnify graphics. With ZUIs information
need not be chopped up to fit on uniformly sized slides. Instead, text, images
and even video sit on a single, limitless surface and can be viewed at whatever
size makes most sense—up close for details, or zoomed out for the big picture. Forthcoming
software for timeline presentations, dubbed ChronoZoom, offers another
zoom-based approach. Events are described or represented along a timeline using
text, images, and video. Zoom in so that a recent 24-hour section of the
timeline fits on a laptop screen, and at this scale, the timeline stretches
about 17 billion kilometres to the left.
The zoom-based approach can transform multi-page websites into a single broad surface that simultaneously displays all content. Instead of clicking and waiting for a new page to appear, a visitor can zoom directly to areas of interest. On the Hard Rock CafĂ© website, a page built using Microsoft’s Silverlight software shows 1,610 memorabilia items. By using the scroll wheel to zoom, details of each one can be expanded to fill the entire screen. Software that zooms deep into moving imagery may be next. America’s Department of Energy is developing software to drill into scientific animations of particle behaviour in nuclear reactions. Called VisIt, its zooming range is equivalent to zipping from a view of the Milky Way to a grain of sand.
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