Microsoft wants to take Seadragon to Windows 8, Windows Mobile 7, everywhere

seadragonMicrosoft’s Live Labs group may have scaled back and reorganized, but its ambitions are still strong if a job advertisement published today is any evidence of its new focus to commercialize its research into products within Microsoft.

Live Labs’ flagship project, Seadragon, which was recently ported to the iPhone now has its targets set on Windows 8, Windows Mobile 7 amongst other Microsoft platforms. The gossipy job advertisement reads,

Are you excited to work on technology that leapfrogs Microsoft products ahead of the competition? Are you ready to dive into a new technology that pushes the envelope to create new markets and products? Do you get stoked by the idea of working in a start-up atmosphere as part of a growing incubation team that bridges the gap between research and product?

The Seadragon team – http://livelabs.com/seadragon/ – is part of Microsoft Live Labs, and we’re creating innovative new content visualization technologies that are revolutionizing both web and client applications. The team has been busy shipping components to multiple Microsoft product teams and experiences externally. Not familiar with Seadragon? Maybe you’ve heard of Photosynth – http://photosynth.net/Default.aspx, that killer photo demo that maps photo collections onto 3d space; Photosynth is powered by Seadragon. How about Silverlight DeepZoom – http://livelabs.com/seadragon/silverlight/; that’s Seadragon technology under the hood! We’ve even done smooth zooming in Ajax via Seadragon Ajax – http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/.

We are a very bottoms-up organization, comprised of passionate self-driven individuals who define our direction on a daily basis. We run the gamut from creative designers to low-level graphics developers. Our technology spans back-end server to CSS pages, managed to unmanaged, OpenGL to DirectX, Silverlight to Javascript. Heck, sometimes we even work on iPhone apps! We don’t limit ourselves by platform or language. If it’s the right tool for the job, we use it. If you are the type of creative individual who likes to lead and is passionate about creating great user and developer experiences, you may make a good match for the Seadragon team.

We’re currently seeking a Lead Developer who’s excited to make a huge impact on Microsoft by bringing Seadragon concepts and code to Microsoft products. We have already put Seadragon in Silverlight. Now we want to take it everywhere: Windows 8, Windows Mobile 7, WPF, XNA. You will be the one building and leading the team to accomplish this challenging task. Experience working as a lead or IC in one or more of these platforms is beneficial, but the ability to quickly ramp up and deliver features in any foreign codebase is crucial to success. IC skills of expert C and C++ are an absolute must, while managed interop experience is also great to have. API design skills and, in particular, the ability to collaborate with another team on how Seadragon technology can be properly exposed according to the native environment will be necessary attributes.

Experience in any of the following will serve you well in this position: .NET/C#, Silverlight, ASP.NET, SOAP/XML web services, Objective-C/Cocoa, Java/J2ME, Flash/ActionScript 3.0, HTML/CSS/JavaScript/JSON, TCP/HTTP networking, GDI+, DirectX, OpenGL, CoreGraphics/CoreImage, WPF/WIC.

14 insightful thoughts

  1. I really don’t understand Seadragon’s efforts of calling this a new technology when we’ve already had and used JPEG2000 for things such as Zoomify (http://www.zoomify.com/), which I’ve been using for some time now. Does it simply expand on the idea, and perhaps make it more efficient?

  2. Perhaps because you can create Seadragon “collection” for free http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=457B17B7-52BF-4BDA-87A3-FA8A4673F8BF&displaylang=en
    can use the free Dll to implement seadragon collection generation to your own programs
    http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2008/11/26/hello-deepzoomtools-dll-deep-zoom-image-tile-generation-made-easy.aspx
    Or perhaps because you can have the functionnalities compatible with any plateform using the Seadragon Ajax
    http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/

    want to see how it can be used ? try to open an image from UNESCO digital library :
    http://www.wdl.org/en/item/3036/pages.html
    no flash or silverlight, only Seajax

  3. there’s this application supposedly part of Office vNext called Moorea.
    looks a lot like the Seadragon app for iPhone.
    wonder if there’s a connection.

Comments are closed.