Ian Gilman 13 months ago
ActivityRank: 267

We don't all know each other, but surely we've got much in common. Please take a moment to introduce yourself here and/or add a little about your interests in your profile. I'll start:

I'm a member of the Seadragon group in Microsoft Live Labs, and have been since before we were acquired. I'm interested in all of our zooming technologies of course, but more generally I'm interested in exploring the new interaction scenarios that zooming enables. I blog about these topics at:

http://dragonosticism.wordpress.com

Nathan Fish 13 months ago
ActivityRank: 6

I'm in the Office Labs group at Microsoft (http://www.officelabs.com). You can see some of the zooming work we do such as the TouchWall video, and pptPlex. Some exciting things are on the horizon, too.

I'm very interested in exploring when and how zooming/canvas based interfaces can help people better engage with their computers and devices.

I don't have a blog - yet? - so will try to post relevant things here.

Sean Boisen 12 months ago
ActivityRank: 8

I'm a computation linguist and information architect with Logos Bible Software (http://logos.com), looking for interesting ways to create and visualize new metadata for our digital library.

I've recently started a Twine on Zoomable Interfaces, which is where i'm putting most of my web collections: http://www.twine.com/home?lid=121vf52bb-vc. I have a special interest in a zoomable interfaces for textual collections with hierarchical structure and rich metadata.

My general blog is http://semanticbible.com/blogos/.

Daniel Gasienica 12 months ago
ActivityRank: 66

Hello,
I am a Computer Science student at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. Currently, I am in my 6th (and hopefully final semester of my Bachelor program) and enrolled in a variety of classes, from Visual Computing, Information Security to Software Engineering and Models of Computation.
I've always been fascinated with everything visual and computing. For about a year and a half I've mostly spent my free time on studying and prototyping ZUIs and their applications. Last October, I've started the OpenZoom project at http://openzoom.org/. The OpenZoom project is about promoting ZUIs and high-resolution imagery on the web.
Currently the biggest subproject of OpenZoom is the OpenZoom SDK, a Flash and Flex framework that facilitates the design & construction of applications using ZUIs. Besides the SDK, I've been working on tools to prototype a ZUI built on top of Flickr with the projects «tandem» and «rendezvous». More recently, I've built GigaPan Desktop that enables people to view the beauty of GigaPan.org panoramas in fullscreen on their desktop. Then there's also GigaPan Mobile, a proxy between GigaPan.org and the Seadragon Mobile application on the iPhone/iPod touch, which brings GigaPan.org to mobile devices.

I post my thoughts and experiments on my blog at http://gasi.ch/blog/. It features many entries on ZUIs & Co. and a couple of entries on other fields of Computer Science that are of interest to me.

adam.hill 12 months ago
ActivityRank: 16

I am a .NET developer, recently working on a large project with lots of GIS and Zoomable UI's in WPF.

I work on/with WorldWind (the C# side) and help out the community.

Vladimir Tsvetkov 12 months ago
ActivityRank: 38

I'm passionate about improving personal computing and the way people interact with computers - reducing PC related psychological distress and increase usability and effectiveness of personal computing systems. I spend most of my time as a software engineer for the company of Obecto.
I use my blog Mastering the Tao of Personal Computing as a sketchpad of thoughts and clues towards an improved personal computing, but I also use it as a knowledge base of my personal discoveries and solved problems in the field of programming (in the last 2 years RIA mostly) and software engineering.
Right now, I'm using Daniel's OpenZoom framework for a small prototype project, but I'm eager to see the application of ZUIs in a more general way.

Henrik Kryger Pallesen 11 months ago
ActivityRank: 30

Greetings Fellow ZUIs.

I'm partner and COO in Lila.io - the Zoomable Rich Media Blogging Platform (www.beta.lila.io).

I've got a business background within web companies and normally dub myself a Web 2.0 Pragmatist. Hence, I want applications to be useful and am not daunted by slick new interfaces unless they provide real value for the user.

We're currently in private beta, but we'd love to give you guys access if you want. Just send med an email to hpATlila.io and I'll send you an invitation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ6KlAiX27U

kelemen.viktor 11 months ago
ActivityRank: 8

Hey guys,

I'm Viktor Kelemen, a front-end engineer at Prezi.com, doing mostly ui development and design.
Besides zooming interfaces, I'm really passionate about the social web and the DIY movement.
I'm a great believer in zooming web layouts.

my personal site can be found here:
http://yikulju.com/

james.davis 10 months ago
ActivityRank: 4

I'm Online Collection Editor for Tate Online, we're looking at different ways to enrich the experience of viewing works of art online. Not least zooming, higher resolutions, environments, and so on.

We have 65,000+ artworks to (one day) make more interactive: http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/

Ian Gilman 8 months ago
ActivityRank: 267

It's great to see so many folks here interested in zooming! I've noticed a lot of people joining lately, however, who haven't yet posted to this introduction thread... we'd love to hear from you!

Bhaskar Agarwal 8 months ago
ActivityRank: 2

I'm a Interface and Experience Design student from National Institute of Design, India. My interest areas are: Cloud Computing, Information arts etc.

Mars Nel 8 months ago
ActivityRank: 2

Hi!
I am a front-end developer during day-time and at night-time I'm busy completing a masters degree at the university of Cape Town, South Africa. My dissertation is about large image support in Institutional Repositories (IR's). I have conducted an online survey which asked participants to rate the overall effectiveness and user interface elements of 4 different zooming applications. The next step is designing a prototype system that may integrate either the OpenZoom viewer or the Seadragon viewer into the DSpace user interface.
As a side project I have implemented Daniel Gasienica's OpenZoom viewer within my own personal website (www.marsnel.co.za) that features my artwork (paintings and drawings).
My interests are: Zooming interfaces, Art and Web Development

tim.chen 8 months ago
ActivityRank: 2

Hi all,

I'm a SDE in Microsoft working on IT internal Products and Frameworks, also enjoy contributing to IronRuby at spare time.

My background in school (Informatics in UW) gives me a twist in enforcing UX principles and caring about the users more than the technology. I also my design eyes is slowly being trained while working with graphic designer friends on exploring interesting apps and UI ideas.

I'm interested on leveraging seadragon on iPhone or Web, and want to explore ideas and possibly implementing something to show it.

SeH 8 months ago
ActivityRank: 82

Currently developing http://automenta.com/spacenet

freddy 8 months ago
ActivityRank: 4

Hi there,

I am a phd student and will end my work soon. The topic of my theses is 'interaction and visualization patterns for zoomable user interfaces'. at our hci workgroup in konstanz, germany we are especially interested in understanding how to support zui navigation and perception by taking advantage of the human perceptual system. You can get more information about me at http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/staff/gundelsweiler . Some projects I finished were about electronic product data management (website: http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/epdm/ ), image retrieval (website and video: http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/bildersuche/ ) and visualization of and interacting with time-dependent data (flash prototype: http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/timedatavis/ ). At the moment I try to prove my patterns scientifically. As soon as I get the results I would be happy to publish my eight final patterns here and get some feedback.
I am especially interested in the theoretical background of zoomable user interfaces. I am using Mendeley to archive and organize my publications. So if you are interesting to exchange links to interesting publications please contact me. There are two books that really inspired me in my work: The human interface (Bolt 1984), The humane interface (Raskin 2000).

Best Regards
Fredrik Gundelsweiler

peter.arvai 5 months ago
ActivityRank: 2

Hi fellow Zoomies,

CEO of Prezi here. We're always interested in feedback on Prezi. Please let me (@peterarvai) or anyone else @prezi know if you have any thoughts, opinions or ideas!

Until then na-noo, na-noo

Nick Bennett 4 months ago
ActivityRank: 2

I appear to be the only one without a formal or serious prior involvement in the concept of zooming, but I know this isn't a prerequisite for joining the group and participating. Just being thoughtful, considerate, and interested are.

I've been working on some personal projects that I think would benefit from the zooming paradigm. For instance, one is a image mosaic (saying that carefully to avoid stepping on toes) program which I would like to be dynamic and infinitely zoomable. I've already looked at various GIS systems and considered writing something from scratch, but after finding OpenZoom I discarded most of the other ideas.

John Myrstad 4 months ago
ActivityRank: 14

Hi.

I`m a VR photographer making 360 and gigapixel images, currently working at www.fuglefjellet.no as product specialist in immersive imaging.

I`m currently reviewing zooming technologies to use in commercial work, and making technology cases.

Samuel Monnier 3 months ago
ActivityRank: 104

Hi there!

I am a theoretical physicist, but I'm also creating algorithmic art in my free time. In particular, I have been creating images which display fractal structures everywhere. I was thrilled when I heard about the zooming image technology, and rebuilt my website so that all my works can be viewed as zoomable images. Check it here:
http://www.algorithmic-worlds.net
I have a few gigapixel images to explore here. I am using Daniel Gasienica's OpenZoom applet. The smooth feel it provides when zooming or sliding has not been matched by any other applet to my knowledge.

Finally, I also have a blog where I discuss about algorithmic art, fractal aesthetic and zoomable images.

Best,

Sam

Richard Karpinski 3 months ago
ActivityRank: 4

I know I lean to the left in many things, but why can't I turn my image a quarter turn clockwise.

After thirty years helping folks use computers as a sysadmin at UCSF, I found Jef Raskin and got to spend seven years with him before he so rudely died. First I helped by nitpicking over the manuscript for "The Humane Interface" and later got involved with Archy for a while. That died poorly, though Aza Raskin did a nice demo in Flash. Now he's pursuing zooming as a user experience fellow at Mozilla.

Jef had described a hospital information system which used zooming. The one's I'd seen before were monstrosities that required weeks of training before they let you touch a keyboard. What Jef didn't say in the book was that novices became confident and competent with less than one minute of training. Measured. And computer experts got it in less than TWO minutes. I thought that was great. It means professors and grandmothers have a chance at it.

But that system used two mouse buttons for zoom in and out. They have the same problem as joy sticks that you have to time their use to get the magnification that you want. But wait, I said, we already know the exact right magnification for every point in the X, Y plane. What if we make the zooming completely automatic? The designer of the zoom world should arrange it nicely, and you probably want visible borders so the zooming is not always a shock when it happens as you mouse around, but that's not really a big problem.

I attribute the rapid learning and ease of use to the fact that for tens of millions of years our ancestors made it back to the nest or we wouldn't be here. Thus geographic navigation comes easily to us. We don't forget where the refrigerator is or the couch. Now that I live in a retirement mobile home park, I am surrounded by people who are frightened by computers. I think they could handle the zooming UI.

When we use even Chrome, if we click on a link, the way back is to click on an arrow way up in the corner. Really different. Much better I think to just mouse back across that visible border. And long drop down menus are not easy to remember or mouse to, compared to even multi-level pie menus. Our objective ought to be to teach the fingers how to operate the computer so our thoughts can remain on the content, the reason we are at the machine.

We do not go to the theatre to watch the projector, and we don't (well we may, but most users don't) go to the computer to deal with the program. They go for the content. Modal dialog boxes should be banned. They are GUARANTEED to break our train of thought.

Oh, I am rambling on. More on many topics is at Nitpicker.pbwiki.com and the JustGo is about this kind of zui while the part about "The Humane Interface" is what Jef extracted as principles and rules from his book. He actually did it in a letter to Tom Gilb who Is my project management guru. He's pretty much the only one I know who explicitly seeks to have numeric goals for qualities like learnability and usability. See "Competitive Engineering" for details.

Now you know more than you wanted to about me and my aspirations.

Richard Karpinski 3 months ago
ActivityRank: 4

Was I supposed to click on Reply to complete my posting? I was unsure what to do. And this is supposed to be the easy part, especially for a guy who's been using computers since 1957. Now, will I ever get to use an auto-zooming user interface?

Do we have a wiki for delving into zooming issues and practicing some sort of kaizen continual refinement of ideas? I was happy to see the links in the Wikipedia article on zooming interfaces an well as what Google reported but exploratory stuff should be collected someplace else.

Ben Voos 73 days ago
ActivityRank: 2

I am the creator of zoomism.com - just something I did to learn Flash Actionscript

Normally I do graphic design, I studied contemporary art, and I actually lived from art painting too.

Navigation by zooming was something I had in mind for nearly 15 years, since just when Flash got introduced (actually it was my girl friend who came up with that). But until today, I would say, computers had not been fast enough for ZUIs.

Ian Gilman 71 days ago
ActivityRank: 267

Richard, you can use the wiki on this group for just that!

http://grou.ps/zooming/wiki