Like A Super Hero

More broadly, Seadragon could become the basis for a beautiful Web browser. Cheap digital cameras now take eight-to-10 megapixel pictures, but such big images don't fit on most screens and file sizes are too large to download quickly. On a Seadragon-based browser, search results could show a small replica of each Web page, for instantaneous judgment. Instead of bouncing back and forth between tabs, you would have all your active windows visible at once, putting your speedy spatial memory to work on organizing the information. Surfing the Internet would become a more visual experience.

No one outside Microsoft knows for sure how zoom fits into the firm's future—its zoom-related plans are locked up tighter than Guantánamo. When asked about the next steps for Seadragon, Aguera y Arcas replied "that I'm not really prepared to answer." Yet Microsoft's embrace of zooming seems to be more ambitious than that of its competitors. Although companies don't reveal their investments in this area, Microsoft has almost quadrupled the number of employees working on Seadragon since the acquisition, to nearly 40. Television companies, too, are looking at zoom to help viewers navigate the thousands of programs now on offer. Netflix and premium television have ushered in the slow death of the neighborhood video store, but many aren't happy about that—they miss browsing the walls for new releases and old comedy favorites. Dan Simpkins believes there's value in that experience, where "you walk the aisles of the new releases, you see a visual directory of all the covers, and when you find something that strikes your fancy, you pick up the box and turn it over and read." Simpkins's company, Hillcrest Labs, is developing a zooming TV interface that makes TV browsing more visual.

Ian Sobieski, a managing director of the venture-capital firm Band of Angels, an early investor in Seadragon, cautions that zooming technologies are still in their earliest stages. "The initial applications probably are not going to strike anyone as immediate productivity enhancers," he says. "But where we are with zoom interactions is where palm computing was in 1982. An interface that incorporates this kind of zoom capability will be commonplace in the not-too-distant future."

Not everybody thinks that zoom technology will be revolutionary. For accessing the hundreds of billions of Web sites out there, text-based searching and keyword tagging might still prove best. Also, applications that are very text-heavy, like a Word document or some Web pages, become unintelligible when rendered small. Zooming "scales up the amount of information that a person can work with at a time by maybe a factor of a hundred," says Ben Bederson, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, "but I have a hundred thousand documents on my computer"—and the Web has billions more. Even our refined visual memories can't manage such a flood. Instead, Bederson thinks that zooming will be a niche application, primarily for photos and cell phones.

Aguera y Arcas and other zoom believers disagree. "I feel a bit like this is a necessity, in the same sense that a color TV after black-and-white was a necessity," he says. "You see it and it's obvious that it has to go that way." In a sense, the Internet as we now know it may come to be seen as a brief step sideways in the evolution of information technology. When a new technology arrives on the scene, people try to apply old standards—the first automakers, for instance, used boat rudders instead of wheels to steer cars. The idea of scrolling information across our screens is a bit like that: it's essentially a throwback to "the pre-codex way of representing text in physical scrolls," says Aguera y Arcas, and hypertext linking is similarly dated. With zoom interfaces poised for a breakthrough, the Internet might finally get a steering wheel.

© 2008