In the past few posts we’ve explored Deep Zoom to explain what it is, how you can use it and what free tools are available so you can try it yourself. There are some great examples of how Deep Zoom’s been used so far, so we thought we’d pull some of the best ones together with recommendations from within the team. Comments welcome!

Here are the top 3 Deep Zoom demo’s from Michael McClary, Platform Strategy Advisor at Microsoft:

	“The US presidents was created by Metia – it’s like a Russian Doll of Presidents”.
	“The MassEffect II advert was a huge success and uses smooth streaming as well as Deep Zoom. You can zoom right into the characters features”.
	“JumpMan includes a lot of nice features including the ‘Tour by Favourite Shoe’”.

Catherine Heller, Senior Technical Evangelist has some favourites too:

	“One of my favourite deep zoom photos for showing the smoothness and responsiveness of large images is Cell Phones, from Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers works.”
	“The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project illustrates the raw horsepower of Deep Zoom (zoom into one of the semi-circles until the images appear, and then zoom into one of those)”.
	“I love the visual cues displayed on the Matterhorn Deep Zoom that highlight areas to zoom into (turn on Points of Interest)”.
	“The Kelly Blue Book Perfect Car Finder is a great example of a useful and practical experience”.
	“One of the most innovative Deep Zoom experiences I’ve seen is the Johan Lafer Recipe site on MSN Germany. As you zoom in to the photos on the right, the recipe text starts to appear until it shows a single recipe photo and text; some of the recipes have a photo-strip at the bottom with step-by-step instructions you can click on to expand (try the chocolate ice cream)”.

“I love the search and navigation within search results of the JumpMan experience Michael called out. Definitely the best social mosaic I’ve seen so far”.

Sara Allison, Underbelly Editor:

“My personal ‘stand-out’ example of Deep Zoom is  A website named desire, whose characters make up a team needed to create a website. Not sure all websites need a team this big, but the idea behind it is great, I can lose an hour or so at a time exploring the characters and what they’re doing, and always find something new each time I take a look around.”

“Finally, possibly the first use of Deep Zoom as a standalone exhibit inside a museum is the Winston Churchill exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London.Software developers Shoothill were given exclusive access to the archives of the Imperial War Museum (Churchill War Rooms) the Baroness Spencer-Churchill Papers and the Churchill Archive Trust as well as the photo archives of the Press Association to build a comprehensive “Tribute Wall” to the great man (there are even personal letters and his school report in the Deep Zoom exhibit).”

So you can see there are some fantastic things you can do with Deep Zoom – and it’s all free! Here’s a reminder of the free Microsoft tools you need:

Visual Studio Express

Silverlight

Deep Zoom Composer

Enjoy!

Using those 50+ pictures I’ve created a Deep Zoom montage using Deep Zoom Composer, including some pictures of the Microsoft BizSpark party and also a wall of tattoos since I was lucky enough to be shown some amazing examples! Thanks so much to everyone who allowed me to photograph them, I really enjoyed meeting you.