I recently put my car up for sale on a few of the leading used car sites here in Australia. In preparation for the sale I had the car detailed and took some nice high resolution pictures of it. You could say i was rather disappointed by the way it was shown on the site.
Yes those 8MP images and my 18MP interior panorama don’t really look the same at 75x60px. So what could it look like if drive.com.au used Deep Zoom? I decided to make a quick mock up:
http://deepzoom.soulclients.com/drive/
No I didn’t spend much time on this, I just grabbed the generated HTML using the web dev plug-in for Firefox, Commented out the little image control they had and stuck in the output from Deep Zoom Composer.
For those not familiar with Deep Zoom, you have to install Silverlight2. For some reason in IE I get a gray box until you mouse of the control, but this is likely something simple and I mocked this up in about 15min. You use your mouse to drag around the image, click to zoom in and shift-click to zoom out, the mouse scroll wheel is the best method however.
Suddenly you have access to the full resolution images without a popup, yay!
Simple example yes, if I committed some more time I could have the control enlarge on mouse over or offer a full screen button. You could provide many more images by simply zooming out a little or have started with a higher resolution single image.
What if the main search page let me browse and filter all cars using a deep zoom collection?