First off I scrapped and grabbed as much data on all the 44 Presidents that I could find. This included everything from their birthdays, religion, salaries to how they died and more. Pivot takes all this data after it has been neatly constructed in an XML file and outputs it as a visual interface. This interface allows you to cross reference the data to compare your subjects in a visually attractive manor.

I decided to wrap up both last years DeepZoom and this years Pivot experiment into one experience and host it on it’s own space at http://www.knowmypresidents.com.

The experience looks like this…

First choose which experience to view, you can flick between them at any point later on.

In the Pivot experiment you will see all 44 Presidents, you can zoom in and out of each President using the mouse wheel or the controls at the top right.

On the left are the options to filter and cross reference information. Selecting different data will automatically update the Presidents shown. You can also flick between grid view and bar graph views at the top right of the screen.

Zoom into each president by clicking on them, doing this will bring up lots of information on the right hand side. You can drag left, right, up and down to view other presidents, the information on the right will change as you drag around.

Switch between the Pivot and the DeepZoom examples by pressing the toggle button in the top left of the screen.

Zoom using the mouse wheel, clicking or using the navigation above. Each President has a picture frame near them that contains the image of the next President.

Keep zooming all the way down from Barack Obama to JFK.

You can read more about the Pivot control at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/pivotviewer/

You can read more about the DeepZoom control at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/deep-zoom/

Metia launched a beta mash up today using FourSquare and Bing maps! The tool, called Near.me, allows you to track where you and your friends have checked in visually using Bing maps.

The app is completely free to use, so go check it out at www.metia.com/nearme

Metia (my employers) have just finished producing not only one of the first ever Silverlight banners for MSN, but the first banner to incorporate Deepzoom and Smooth Streaming and be expandable. View the Mass Effect Silverlight banner live on MSN.

The video also features a full screen view for the HD video.

The Smooth Streaming allows users to view the video at the highest quality possible based on their internet connection and CPU speed. If the users connection drops to a slower speed during the video, the Smooth Streaming seamlessly adapts to keep the video stream consistent and free of buffering.

The banner also features a Deepzoom component.

This part of the experience allows users to zoom in as close as to see the stubble on the characters face! The Deepzoom functionality lets you zoom into an image serving up only the part of the image you are looking at and thus not having to download megabytes of data.

This banner is running live on MSN right now, and is due to feature on the MSN home page this Saturday.

You can read more in the following posts:

Dean Gifford at Rocket Panda talks about a World first

Damon Serji talks about the first interactive Silverlight banner in the world

Metia official statement by Steve Ellis

Imagery from Adam Wignall at Digital Diversity.

This example was put together with Deep Zoom Composer.

I hit a problem with hitting over 4 billion pixels in Deep Zoom Composer, to avoid this I found I could only go 6 pictures in depth.

To get the full 10 pictures working I used the following work around. First off the application won’t let you export a project when you hit over 4 billion pixels, but it will let you run a preview. By running a preview the program will create a .xap file and a Generate Images folder. The preview will open up, but the files it creates don’t seem to work once accessing them after the preview is closed. By changing the .xap to a .zip you can access the contents inside, of which one file is the .xaml file. I copied this across into the exported project (the one containing 6 images deep) and then changed the file extension back to .xap. Then I copied across the Generated Images folder and hey presto I got 10 working. I couldn’t get any more than 10 working, I would have loved to of gone through all 44 Presidents.

You can download Deep Zoom Composer from here or from www.silverlight.net.