Friday, February 11, 2005
VDQI: Continuous zooming on vectorized maps with fractal geometry
Okay, so the post title is a bit opaque, but it will clear up in a bit. I met someone at a party this week who's been working on a neat bit of technology, which allows you to take some very large vectorized image*, like a road map, and zoom in from a wide view to a close up in one continuous zoom, rather than a series of discrete steps. Imagine using MapQuest, and having a slider bar to zoom from the whole country to your city to your street, all in the same window. Now do that in real-time, over a slow connection, and no jerkiness in the emergence or scaling of objects.
Better than words is the experience itself; follow the above link, and look for the map demo.
What you get is very elegant and useful for, well maps, at the moment. But I wonder if it might not be the basis as well for very user-friendly explorable 3D plots of quantitative data...
*"Vectorized" refers to the distinction between vector graphics, which consist of precise mathematically defined points, lines, and fills, and raster graphics, which record the color value of each pixel in the mapped space. Vector graphics are very useful for maps, scientific diagrams, and 3D simulations; raster graphics are more practical for pictures of real world objects.
Better than words is the experience itself; follow the above link, and look for the map demo.
What you get is very elegant and useful for, well maps, at the moment. But I wonder if it might not be the basis as well for very user-friendly explorable 3D plots of quantitative data...
*"Vectorized" refers to the distinction between vector graphics, which consist of precise mathematically defined points, lines, and fills, and raster graphics, which record the color value of each pixel in the mapped space. Vector graphics are very useful for maps, scientific diagrams, and 3D simulations; raster graphics are more practical for pictures of real world objects.
