Monitor: Prophets of zoom | The Economist

Looks like the Economist is finally catching on to zoomable interfaces.

Monitor: Prophets of zoom | The Economist: 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 Caf�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, says Becky Springmeyer, who is working on the project at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Will deep zooming catch on? Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist and author of “The Vision Revolution”, notes that the human visual system has to cope with zooming when moving, say, through a dense grove of trees. Today’s zooming software operates on a different scale, but as touch-screen devices proliferate, zooming has become a popular way to manipulate maps and photos—so perhaps it will catch on in other areas, too.