I've previously blogged about mine and Jose's presentation at REMIX 08 Australia. Jose did an awesome 15 minute DeepZoom demo. If you missed it, or want to see it again, Michael Kordahi from Microsoft Australia have done a DG.TV episode with Jose. Personally I love the co-viewing demo, using Silverlight 2 sockets support.
One of the things Jose talked about is Deep Zoom-enable any image on a web site, and how that is possible to implement today using a API. Since he only had 15 minutes he didn't have time to go into the technical details around this. A question from @andythompy came up on the Silverlight forums about weather or not there actually is a Deep Zoom API, as he couldn't find any information about this online… I figured I'd write this post to clarify and provide some resources to developers who are eager to start building dynamic, automated DeepZoom applications today.
First to clarify, there is currently no Deep Zoom API or SDK - but we do got the second best thing; a command line tool called "SparseImageTool.exe". This is the "nuts-and-bolts" behind the Deep Zoom Composer and does the actual work of taking the images and compositions you specify in the designer and turning them into Deep Zoom collections. The "SparseImageTool.exe" takes a bunch of parameters, including an XML file containing the list of images to include in the composition. I'm not going into details on how to automate this tool, but my friend Giorgio Sardo from Imagine Cup 2006, currently working for Microsoft UK, have written a C# proof-of-concept application taking a folder as input parameter and outputting a Deep Zoom collections of all images in the folder. The source, as well as details about the SparseImageTool.exe can be found in his blog post titled "Deep Zoom Batch Export (Programmaticly using C#)".
So what about future versions - will there be a Deep Zoom SDK? I haven't found any official announcements from Microsoft, but when asked this question on the Expression blog Kirupa Chinnathambi (developer on the Expression team) wrote this:
deef - we are working on that [DeepZoom API], and you can do that already with a lot of trickery using the SparseImageTool.exe found in the Deep Zoom Composer's Program Files folder.
An example of what you suggest can be seen on a public preview site called PhotoZoom: http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com/"
The description on the PhotoZoom site is as following:
PhotoZoom is an experimental site developed at Microsoft, running on the Microsoft Live Labs Incubation Platform. It uses the Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 to create photo albums with user uploaded photographs.
One of the nice features of Photo Zoom is the RSS/ATOM import. I gave it a try by pointing it to my Flickr RSS feed. After less then a minute waiting I had a Deep Zoomable Flickr Set.
This is a cool example of what is possible today using the SparseImageTool.exe and gives you some idea of what's possible in the future. Hopefully this posts clarifies the current state of automatic Deep Zoom and points you in the right direction if you're planning on building your own application.
Update: At yesterdays TechED US keynote Microsoft announced that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 will be available this week. Laurence Moroney blogged about this, and included some interesting Deep Zoom hints:
Deep Zoom -- this has been hugely updated. The file format is now XML instead of a binary format, so the ability to generate your own Deep Zoom images and collections server side will become easier. There's also some nice new event models around zoom/pan state.