History
The longest running effort to create a ZUI has been the Pad++ project started by Ken Perlin, Jim Hollan, and Ben Bederson at New York University and continued at the University of New Mexico under Hollan's direction. After Pad++, Bederson developed Jazz, then Piccolo, and now Piccolo2D at the University of Maryland, College Park, which is still actively being developed in Java and C#. More recent ZUI efforts include Archy by the late Jef Raskin, ZVTM developed at INRIA (which uses the Sigma lens technique), and the simple ZUI of the Squeak Smalltalk programming environment and language. The term ZUI itself was coined by Franklin Servan-Schreiber and Tom Grauman while they worked together at the Sony Research Laboratories. They were developing the first Zooming User Interface library based on Java 1.0, in partnership with Prof. Ben Bederson, University of New Mexico, and Prof. Ken Perlin, New York University.
Previous to the availability of ZUI toolkits, the virtual desktops feature of many window managers provided some of the organizational benefits of ZUIs. Virtual desktops differ from ZUIs in that they don't provide a physical metaphor of continuous zooming but a collection of separate, fixed size desktop containers. Virtual desktops functions are available by default in KDE, GNOME and Mac OS X Leopard, and through an add-on in Microsoft Windows XP.
GeoPhoenix, a Cambridge, MA, startup associated with the MIT Media Lab, founded by Julian Orbanes, Adriana Guzman, Max Riesenhuber, released the first mass-marketed commercial Zoomspace in 2002-3 on the Sony CLIÉ PDA handheld, with Ken Miura of Sony
In 2006, Hillcrest Labs introduced the HoME television navigation system, the first graphical, zooming interface for television.
Most recently, Microsoft's Live Labs has released a zooming UI for web browsing called DeepFish for the Windows Mobile 5 platform.
Apple's iPhone (premiered June 2007) uses a stylized form of ZUI, in which panning and zooming are performed through a touch interface. It is not a full ZUI implementation since these operations are applied to bounded spaces (such as web pages or photos) and have a limited range of zooming and panning.
Recently Franklin Servan-Schreiber founded Zoomorama, based on work he did at the Sony Research Laboratories in the mid-nineties. The Zooming Browser for Collage of High Resolution Images was released in Alpha in October 2007. Zoomorama's browser is all Flash based. Development of this project was stopped in 2010, but many examples are still available on the site.
Read more about this topic: Zooming User Interface
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