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Zooming user interface

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Example of a ZUI

In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ee) is a graphical environment where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different documents. A ZUI is a type of graphical user interface (GUI). Information elements appear directly on an infinite virtual desktop (usually created using vector graphics), instead of in windows. Users can pan across the virtual surface in two dimensions and zoom into objects of interest. For example, as you zoom into a text object it may be represented as a small dot, then a thumbnail of a page of text, then a full-sized page and finally a magnified view of the page.

ZUIs use zooming as the main metaphor for browsing through hyperlinked or multivariate information. Objects present inside a zoomed page can in turn be zoomed themselves to reveal further detail, allowing for recursive nesting and an arbitrary level of zoom.

When the level of detail present in the resized object is changed to fit the relevant information into the current size, instead of being a proportional view of the whole object, it's called semantic zooming.[1]

Some experts consider the ZUI paradigm as a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI, being a Post-WIMP interface. But little effort is currently spent developing ZUIs, while there are ongoing efforts for developing GUIs.

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, 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 X window managers, such as the window managers in KDE and GNOME, provided some of the organizational benefits of ZUIs. Mac OS X Leopard ships with virtual desktops as a feature called "Spaces." Microsoft has a limited implementation of virtual desktops in a suite of after-market XP items known as "PowerToys" under the title "Virtual Desktop Manager." 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.

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.[2]

In 2006, Hillcrest Labs introduced the HoME television navigation system, the first graphical, zooming interface for television.[3]

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. This project was closed in 2010.

ZUI projects

Eagle Mode’s file manager displaying plain text source code directories

This section presents a list of notable projects using Zooming User Interfaces. [Note 1]

See also

  • A Focus-plus-context screen is based on the idea of focus+context, to provide both details and an overall view at the same time.
  • SpicyNodes uses a variation of the radial tree approach, with a focus nodes zoomed in, and other nodes zoomed out.

Notes

  1. ^ Note to researchers - check this old version of this article to find an extensive list of links to ZUI examples and projects that were removed. Valuable links are buried in other link removal edits. The links removed but preserved in the "Edit History" comprise a compilation of "Zoomable User Interface" examples and information.

References

  1. ^ Peter Bright. "Hands-on with Windows 8: A PC operating system for the tablet age". Ars Technica.
  2. ^ "Sony implements GeoPhoenix interface in new CLIE PEG-NZ90 and NX series handhelds". EDP Weekly's IT Monitor. 2003-01-20. Retrieved 2008-05-13.
  3. ^ Popular Mechanics 2007. Retrieved November 11, 2011. Glen Derene. Wii 2.0: Loop remote lets you click by gesture.
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