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Zooming user interface

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Example of a ZUI

In computing, a Zooming User Interface or ZUI is a graphic environment that allows users to interact with system objects. It is a fairly evolutionary outgrowth of the graphical user interface, or GUI. A ZUI can represent different levels of scale and detail, and the user can change the scale of the viewed area in order to show more detail.

In Zooming User Interfaces, information elements are shown 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.

The ZUI is an interface paradigm that is seen by some as a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI. However, compared with ongoing GUI development efforts, the resources devoted to creating ZUIs is small.

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 and later Piccolo [1] 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.

GeoPhoenix [2], 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 [3] of Sony.

The Nintendo DS Browser uses a basic ZUI. When browsing the web, the full page appears on the bottom screen, with a frame that the user can move around. The top screen shows a zoomed-in view of the frame.

ZUI projects

Examples

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