Microsoft%20annotation.JPGWe're used to doing many things with an image: zoom it, pan it, scroll it. Google Maps, especially in its satellite view, is really nothing more than a monstrous gigapixel image that can be explored.

One of the things that Microsoft researchers are doing at the User Interface Software and Technology conference this week is to offer an interesting method to explore a digital image: by panning and zooming, but by annotating as well.

A paper to be presented at the conference suggests there's room for additional information to be presented to a user as he or she zooms in on an image. Qing Luan and her co-authors of "Annotating Digital Images" created a Web site with some demonstrations of the concepts presented in the paper. Playing one of the movie files will explain it pretty quickly.

In short, what Luan suggests is that a complex image can be annotated with text that can fade in and out, as the user zooms in or out, highlighting objects of interest. Sound can also be embedded. The result is a sense of motion into an image, known as vection, even though the a user is simply focusing on an increasingly narrow portion of it. Think of it as a poor man's virtual reality.

I would think this would be a relatively simple addition for Microsoft or one of its mapping competitors to implement: simply invisibly associate a set of pixels with a particular label or sound, and show or play the associated file when the user zoomed in enough to "focus" on a particular object. One might also think of this in the context of Microsoft Photo Viewer: as an educational tool or multimedia browser, tagging a photo with additional information or multimedia files might be educational and fun.

But if Web traffic is the overarching goal, wouldn't a hypertext link to another window make more sense?

The paper was presented Monday by Steven Drucker of Microsoft Live Labs Research, and the second named author of the paper.