PhotoZoom is an online version of Deep Zoom for Microsoft’s Silverlight 2, which is designed to make it easier to work with huge images or collections of images. Currently, PhotoZoom does not have all of Deep Zoom’s features, such as the ability to add additional images deep within a zoom, however it does still present a neat way to enable visitors to explore high resolution images at a variety of scales, and take in some of the details not apparent at first glance.
Two obvious archaeological applications spring to mind. The first would be photographs of panoramas, perhaps excavations in progress or archaeological landscapes. The second is to use the PhotoZoom gallery as a showcase for artefacts, which could give the website visitor a far better chance to see minute details than they would have seeing the object behind a museum’s glass case.
In the spirit of the second idea, I thought I would try some images of dental calculus taken using a scanning electron microscope, originally for my masters dissertation. Unfortunately, WordPress.com doesn’t like users embedding objects, so instead I used the images on a new entry about dental calculus on WikiArc (requires Microsoft Silverlight plugin).
