September 8, 2004
New Visual Technologies, Multimedia Possibilities
In her study of Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Berkeley Scholar Svetlana Alpers makes the assertion that advances in 'visual technologies' resonate large cultural advances. Alpers uses this to analyze Dutch renaissance painting using notions of the 'telescope', 'microscope'. Recently, online 'networked' visual possibilities have begun to open up with similar 'new' sets of visual technologic possibility. This entry glances at 'zoomifyer' for Flash and what it means for digital libraries and online cognitive possibility.
Zoomifyer is a new imaging technology that allows 'zooming' in on an image without loss of resolution. Why is this important? For one, it allows, a new way to present 'visual' image libraries(150 k jpeg), (18 megabyte TIFF, Caimanera Cuba. , With contextual window, hotspot links, 200 zoom and preset view ), hotspots on a cartographic map. For another, it solves problems of 'image' compression by tiling images and progressively downloading larger images so that image searching becomes seamless and (download) size becomes a non-issue. The image viewer presents the user with a simple intuitive set of buttons for zooming into, out of, and around the image, while a window preserves context for larger zooms. The value is apparent and ranges from art history to geographical imaging problems to military (click on security demo) to scientific, to medical (click on medical) such as studying cells of the body. A recent MX Developer journal article goes so far to conjecture that this technology represents the next stage of static image delivery on the web. The technology also allows dynamic visual annotation of zoomed materials, 'visual hotspots', zoom slideshows, panoramas, 3-D object rrotation and zoom-type VR.
The parallels with Alpers' previous work here are worth reflecting upon. Because of its new visible 'proof', the telescope brought observation of previously distant 'planets' and a new cosmologic idea of 'solar systems' to the naked eye. This 'instrument' also opened up new scientific disciplines (i.e. astronomy) and sophisticated techno-political military possibility (ie. naval navigation, naval warfare, naval trade, the British Empire). Here similar visual resonances are opened for the 'static image' in a networked online environment (the Internet). The effects are complex and will be widespread. To look at a single example, for medicine, the microscope and its evolution opened up medicine to new areas (microbiology, biochemistery, now 'molecular biology') and further development. The zoomifyer places these technological visualization possibilities into a networked online global instantly accessed environment where the term 'resolution' is given new meaning.
The possibilities for both enhanced searching and discovery become rich when a set of these images are attached to a online database (i.e. Oracle, MySql) as a digital image library or networked in an international environment to assemble global expert opinion (i.e. medicine). For more advanced application possibilities, hotspots in images (ie. URL links or descriptions) can be incorporated with text captions. Similarly, combined with new GPS technologies, aerial photos, databases and space imaging the possibilities have yet to be seen.
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