Seadragon Software was a team within the Microsoft Live Labs. Its product, Seadragon, is a web optimized visualization technology that allows graphics and photos to be smoothly browsed, regardless of their size. Seadragon is the technology powering Microsoft's

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. Wh ...

, Pivot, Photosynth and the standalone cross-platform Seadragon application for iPhone and iPad. Seadragon technology allows one to view extremely large and high resolution images without the loading time or latency typically associated with large images. The developers behind Seadragon also allow users to upload photos and create their own Seadragon style image to be viewed online.

History

Founded in 2003, the company that would eventually become Seadragon Software was originally named Sand Codex. Based in

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of whi ...

, Sand Codex moved to

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

in 2004 to accommodate founder Blaise Agüera y Arcas's wife's new role at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

. In 2005 Sand Codex received $4 million in angel and

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

funding, including $2 million from the Madrona Venture Group. It was after this injection of capital that the company changed its name to Seadragon Software. In early 2006, Seadragon Software was acquired by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

and organized within the newly formed Live Labs, a midpoint between Microsoft's online product groups and MSR, under Dr. Gary William Flake. Silverlight 2 released in 2008 with the Deep Zoom feature. This marked the first publicly shipped Seadragon software. Seadragon made further contributions in Silverlight 3 and announced others for Silverlight 4. Photosynth launched the summer of 2008; almost 2 years after its Community Technology Preview, the public can now create and view synths. The Photosynth team officially broke off from Seadragon to join

MSN MSN (meaning Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95. The Microsoft Net ...

Implementations

Seadragon Ajax is a pure JavaScript implementation of the Seadragon technology, released by Microsoft as an open-source library. It is now under active development as OpenSeadragon. The Deep Zoom feature of Microsoft's

technology is an adaptation of Seadragon technology. Seadragon Mobile was an iPhone app (no longer available) created from Seadragon technology.

How Seadragon works

Seadragon technology is based around two distinct platforms, one being Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, the other being Microsoft’s Silverlight with DeepZoom application. Using the Silverlight version requires that the user downloads the Microsoft Silverlight application. Alternatively, the AJAX version requires only the standard JavaScript web plug-ins available in most browsers and portable devices. AJAX technology has allowed for the increased interaction and rich user experiences which are typically characteristic of Web 2.0 enabled websites. For the creation of Seadragon style content and images, when one uploads a picture, it is converted into a number of Deep Zoom Image (DZI) format files. These can be combined to make up a Deep Zoom Collection (DZC). These Deep Zoom Images create a digital tiled mosaic, of small (256x256) images, with each tile representing a portion or layer or set of pixels of the image at one specific resolution. This Deep Zoom format allows for only the pixels needed for a particular view on the screen to be loaded at one particular time – this results in a more effective use of bandwidth and computer resources. This also means that the amount of data needing to be transferred at any one time is proportional to the number of pixels on the screen. This is an alternative to loading all the pixels (data) of an image all at once with standard image formats. The figurative “secret sauce” behind Seadragon is the technology that allows for the seamlessly smooth transition between the tiles and layers amongst the DeepZoom collection (DZC) files that make up an image.

File format

All current implementations of Seadragon technology make use of the Deep Zoom Images, consisting of either a single Deep Zoom Image or a Deep Zoom Collection.

Examples

* Photosynth uses Seadragon for its D3D viewer and

for its default viewer. * Pivot uses a combination of Seadragon and WPF to render images and collections. * ChronoZoom is a timeline for

Big History Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach ...

being developed for the International Big History Association by

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

and originally by the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and Microsoft Live Labs * is the Bing search app for the iPhone. The mapping experience is built on top of the Seadragon Mobile. *

SimpleDL SimpleDL is digital collection management software that allows for the upload, description, management and access of digital collections. In addition to that, it is UTF-8 compatible. SimpleDL is not limited by format and is capable of handling doc ...

uses Ajax Seadragon for its image display.

References

External links

*
Seadragon AjaxOpenSeadragonZoomo
- image sharing website, uses OpenSeadragon for its image display.
Zoomable
- conversion tool, API available
The Seadragon Showcase page
lists a number of examples live on the web. {{Microsoft Research Labs, state=uncollapsed Seadragon Microsoft software Graphics software IOS software