Seadragon By Microsoft Live Labs

Seadragon developed at Microsoft Live Labs, aims towards making a superior picture experience. It is just like the deep zoom functionality of silverlight and can expand and shrink wall size pictures to mobile size pictures when maintaining their clarity. The Seadragon Deep Zoom functionality can be used in Silverlight application to give a rich look to your applications. Similarly an Ajax version of Seadragon is also available. The following four "promises" of Seadragon has been listed down on the MS Live Labs web site:

1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
3. Transitions are smooth as butter.
4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

This will definitely pose a challenge to Adobe Flash which was earlier used to show rich picture contents on web UI. Find more information on Seadragon here.

Cheers to Microsoft!