Lets not forget the Zoom UI in the Opera powered Wii Web Browser.
Its pretty awesome… It starts off showing the entire page and all you do is place your cursor over an area and hit the (+) button. It looks at the size of the content your cursor is over and zooms appropriately. You can then move up or down or zoom back out and select another area to zoom into.
Seems similar to what they might work well on the iPhone.
Also, WeFail.com, a design company, has done some pretty interesting site designs for merch companies on the zooming content, starting out very far… and then either letting you zoom in, or doing it for you depending on your selection. I think they get quite a few things right in these “experimental” websites.
By the way, the BBDO site is so cool. If you play an audio (check out the one on Singapore), then zoom around, you can hear the volume become softer or louder and as you pan around, the audio appears on the left or the right hand side.
[ICR] is right, of course, while Mac OS X offers some kind of zoomable interface, it’s not what Oberon implements or what Aza envisions. Again, I would encourage everyone to have a look at Bluebottle/Oberon. It has had precisely that kind of zoomable interface for years.
I remember when I first saw it. One of the developers showed us a presentation of Bluebottle running on Bluebottle. Starting up, he had a lot of files lying on his desktop. Among them were the slides of his presentation, aligned horizontally. He simply zoomed into the first slide until it was full-screen to start the presentation. Pretty cool and intuitive if you ask me.
So I know I’m commenting late but I had to post this. I had an old IBM Think pad that was actually nice to use. When I got it I was checking out what extra functions it had on the keys and one of them was the “Func+Zoom In/Out”, I was curious to see it so I did “Zoom In”. This is where the magic happened, that button all it did was change the resolution on the laptop screen from 1024x768 to 800x600 and so on… That is some kick ass new zooming technology there buddy!
The Brain Maps API is a lightweight multiresolution image viewer that lets you view Zoomify images. It has been designed to be small and fast, and to consume very little memory, yet still be very functional and extensible. Future versions will enable you to add overlays to multiresolution images (including markers and polylines) and to display clickable labels. The Brain Maps API is a free service, available for any web site that is free to consumers. Available at http://brainmaps.org/index.php?p=brain-maps-api
Great article, Jeff. I’m working on a ZUI for my company, and I’m always looking for articles on the web for material to help explain ZUI concepts to my colleagues.
Given Microsoft’s efforts in research projects such as Seadragon, I believe you gave them appropriate credit. You mention Jef and Aza Raskin at the top of the article, so you’ve certainly given credit where it’s due.
Will Wright credits the movie “Powers of Ten” for inspiring ZUI aspects of Spore, his upcoming PC game. Spore includes key ZUI features such as the ability to zoom from a galaxy-level view, to stellar, to planetary, etc.
Readers may confuse proper ZUI-like zooming with magnification. The difference is “contextual zooming”: objects don’t simply appear larger or smaller, they actually change representational forms. Wright’s demonstration of the “Civilization” stage of Spore shows contextual zooming: when viewed close up, a city is shown in great detail, but when viewed from a distance the city’s features appear cartoony and exaggerated. (I believe I see contextual zooming in the screenshots from Supreme Commander, too.)
Readers interested in learning more about ZUIs should check out The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. CiteSeer.com has numerous academic papers related to ZUIs, including references to the earlier ZUI-related work. (The earliest example may be Spatial Data Management System by Donelson of MIT, a system from the late 1970s.)
Again, thanks for calling attention to ZUIs. I wish I’d found your article sooner.
I’m trying to work out the Calibri font issue. Its really terrible - I had standard font smoothing turned on (because on my screens it looks just perfectly peachy that way) and just read some of the above posts that calibri font needs cleartype. But cleartype turns ALL of my fonts blurry, though it does improve Calibri. But this is kind of like cutting off your face to spite your nose? All of my fonts are perfectly clear and very happy with standard font smoothing, and ClearType just screws them all up. I’m running XP with some very nice IBM LCD monitors. I’m thinking of deleting Calibri and replacing it in the font substitution table with verdana or helvetica or something. Or maybe there is a way to tune my cleartype settings - though what a pain in the arse that would be, and why should I have to do that? blah.
I downloaded the MS ClearType Tuner and messed around with the settings. I essentially had to decide among:
a) Disabling ClearType and having all my fonts look razor sharp except for the new CT-Only fonts like the ubiquitous Calibri
b) Enabling ClearType with RGB striping - in which case the colors all look right but the fonts ALL look blurry and make me want to rub my eyes all the time
c) Enabling ClearType with BGR striping - in which case there are minor color artifacts in the text but the fonts look mostly clear and will result in only minor eyeball friction
I opted for C (though until the Calibri issue came up I had been perfectly happy using standard font smoothing.)
I found out along the way that under XP, IE and MS Office apps each have a separate option on whether or not to use ClearType, so this is why Calibri looked like poop in Firefox and Outlook but pretty good in Word. Odd.
As you’ve mentioned OS X, it seems rude not to mention its built-in zoom feature - Ctrl+Scroll-Wheel (Ctrl+two fingers on touchpad for us laptop Applers) zooms into (and back out to 100%) the whole screen. I only learnt about this recently - don’t know how much I’ll use it, mind…
Jeff - the Vista Ctrl+scroll-wheel behaviour is completely different to the OS X behaviour (I installed Vista for my Dad last weekend - it was a ‘free’ upgrade for his new PC) - it’s interesting to have icons so big that you can get four of them onto the desktop
The OS X behaviour essentially zooms in and gives you a pannable partial view of the screen. As you move the mouse pointer, the screen pans and the mouse pointer gradually shifts from the centre of the screen (when the view is over the centre of the magnified screen) to the edge when the view is at the edge of the screen.
Coming to this discussion a little after 8 years since this was posted. I’ve seen the video of Asa presentation before. We are looking to implement a zoomable UI as it seems like a perfect metaphor for the app we are building currently. There is a good bunch of research, utilities and results of usability testing performed on this. Thought I’d post it for someone who comes into this conversation today