In the past year, I’ve experimented with different ways to visualize non-Euclidean tessellations. Mainly, I’ve made movies with simple zooms or animations. But sometimes I think I want something more interactive, so that viewers can explore tessellations as they wish, as opposed to watching them fly by.
Last year, I dabbled with creating some ways of interactively zooming into images using the browser. Here are some examples, one using Javascript, and another using Google Maps. The first one was kind of a Javascript learning project for me, as was the second. Both suffer from latency problems.
Then I discovered Seadragon.com, a Microsoft site for creating and hosting zoomable images. Seadragon technology comes in various flavors, including one that uses pure Javascript, and another that uses Silverlight. The functionality is similar to the zooming functionality of Google Maps, but has a nicer feel. An example, using one of my images, can be found at http://seadragon.com/view/4bj, or seen below.
Note that there are controls for zooming in and out, and for using the full browser window. You pan by clicking and dragging on the image. The controls have a nice springy physics to them, and interactivity feels like real time. And even though you may not be able to exactly contr0l the zoom levels as finely as you like, the zoom transitions are continuous. The original image was 24000 x 13500 (324 megapixels)