Like A Super Hero

Clad in a comfy black t shirt and jeans, Blaise Aguera y Arcas stood onstage at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in Monterey, California, early last year in front of a projection screen that ran the height of an entire wall. On the screen was a tapestry of hundreds of high-quality digital documents and photos; one image, a scan of an ancient map of the world, had more data than most hard drives. Ordinarily, interacting with—and making sense of—such huge amounts of data would be tedious, if not impossible. Anyone who's tried to work with a 10-megapixel photo on a laptop screen knows this. But the new program Aguera y Arcas was demoing, dubbed Seadragon, made every transition seamless and lightning fast. The audience saw the patchwork quilt of images become a single shot of the façade of Notre Dame cathedral—and in another instant, a close-up of a gargoyle's tooth.

Seadragon, a technology acquired by Microsoft in 2006, is a baby step toward addressing a problem that many techies have pondered for decades: computing, for all its transformative effects on economy and culture, is in a very fundamental way stuck on neutral. Anybody who's sat in front of a computer screen searching and scrolling through reams of information has had an inkling that something is amiss. Google may give us 2 million hits, but we rarely look past the first 10. Most Web sites are designed for a typical PC, though we also view them on cell phones and television sets, and the transfer is far from perfect. If the Internet is such a boon, why is sifting through all the information it brings to our fingertips so laborious?

The Internet, it seems, doesn't take advantage of how humans best process information. Evolution granted Homo sapiens a high degree of visual acuity—all the better to pick out camouflaged predators on the savanna—and despite the progress of civilization, we're still highly visual creatures. "Humans are best at scanning over a fixed field and finding what they want," says design guru Edward Tufte, whose books on visual display have influenced generations of designers. Finding a jar of honey in the kitchen cupboard is a simple task—you have an intuitive sense of where it rests in your house and how to access it. Translated to the computing world, the process becomes more deliberate: click the "house" folder, navigate to the "kitchen" subdirectory, find another folder dubbed "cupboards"—and so on. "If you just think about everything in your house, and all the places you know in the world," says Aguera y Arcas, "you have a much richer mental map of all those things than you have of where your files are in your computer." Scrolling and linking are inferior modes of taking in information. "Humans are incredibly good at spatial navigation and incredibly bad at navigating through a list of generic icons or generic text," says John San Giovanni, a former Microsoft researcher now developing zoom technology for a phone interface at start-up ZenZui.

These limitations are not lost on the technology giants and forward-thinking entrepreneurs working to commercialize a new way to take in information visually: the zoom interface. In its simplest form, it displays information all at once—all the photos in an album, say, or all the files on a PC, or all the entries in a database, or all the items retrieved in a search—and when you spot something of interest, you zoom down into it. In this way, zooming represents an upgrade from the second- and third-best methods for accessing information (scrolling and linking) to the best option: displaying information like a landscape, and giving people the chance to zoom down to the details.

The basic idea of zooming has tantalized techies since the early days of the Internet, and still inspires those who believe it has the potential to take human-computer interaction to a new, more productive level. Only recently have engineers had the advances in display technology, broadband connections and video processors capable of coping with a zoom interface. As a result, prototype zoom interfaces are now up and running in labs around the world. Microsoft is looking to zoom technologies to catapult it once again into a position of technology leadership, but Google is also developing zoom technology in a big way. It already employs a form of zoom in Google Earth, and so does Apple (in the iPhone). A few start-ups like ZenZui and Hillcrest Labs are also bringing zoom into new markets, including a broader swathe of mobile devices and even your home television.

Google Earth displays the globe as a landscape ready to be explored—click the mouse and you zoom, like a superhero, into and out of the Aegean Sea, Illinois or Sudan. "You don't necessarily need to go to an index or keyword search to find something about a place," says John Hanke, director of Google Maps and Earth. "There's real joy in being able to experience the world that way."