Zooming

Zooming isn't much fun without something to zoom on. We're always coming up with ideas about "wouldn't it be cool to have a huge diagram of x to zoom in on?", but, not being artists, we rarely get around to creating it. The flip side is there aren't a lot of artists familiar with zooming, so they're not creating art with that in mind. There are some notable exceptions, of course, but we need more! So hey, how about we throw some of those ideas out there, and maybe we can start getting people excited about actually creating this imagery.

Yeah, you're right, we definitely need more content, though I don't really know where the truly creative people hang out – deviantArt? I've teamed up with a couple of friends who run a creative studio and in order to tackle the zooming chicken-egg problem, together we'll design a zooming microsite. For demonstrating before/after zooming, I've created a zooming remix of the already fantastic IsThisYourLuggage.com on my blog at http://gasi.ch/blog/openzoom-is-this-your-luggage/ Let's create a collection of resources where we can get in touch with creative minds to encourage them to come up with zooming art. How about organizing a zooming contest? This community here has people from many different companies and since all thrive on the expansion of zooming, maybe everyone could pitch in something.

One thing I'll get around to one of these days: I've been collecting movie ticket stubs for several decades now; I'd love to scan them all in and create a mammoth mosaic of my moviegoing history with all the wrinkles and tears of these physical mementos.

Daniel, Yeah, deviantArt is probably a good place to look. Your zooming microsite project sounds great as well! The luggage zoom is fun. Reminds me of this Flickr meme: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/whatsinmybag/interesting/

Another amusing piece of zoomable content, a large poetry collage: http://cv.rambisyouth.com/

Some other ideas I've had for candidates for zooming are things like one-sheet educational materials, such as a large anatomy sheet which, when zoomed out, shows a general view of the human body with overview text, while zooming in on certain parts shows detail text about that area. This is a pretty intensive idea and would involve someone with much more time and patience than anyone I know. Another example along the same lines, and one a little simpler to construct, is a solar system diagram -- when zoomed out, show the solar system, and be able to zoom in on individual celestial bodies. I think there's a lot of potential content with this same formula -- big picture, little details -- that could make education a little more entertaining.

This is how we present a huge conference with all 124 presentations: http://mix.zoomery.com. You can filter with tags, browse every powerpoint file and even watch the videos seamlessly.

Here's a great one: http://www.iangilman.com/blog/2004/10/zoom-quilt.php This is actually version 2 of a much older project.