In her comment on one of my posts the other day, Sally plausibly assumed that my Pad zoomable interface was influenced by Blade Runner<\/i>. In fact, Pad evolved from an obsession I had back in 1979 to create a portable device that would show zoomable maps, to be stored as successions of tiled images with progressively doubled resolution.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until 1989 that I finally got my hands on a computer fast enough to let me build a good real-time demo of the concept — my first implementation of the Pad zoomable interface. The paradigm of zooming through the use of powers-of-two tiles gradually spread, particularly after David Fox and I published a SIGGRAPH paper about it in 1993, and eventually became used for lots of things, such as Google Maps.<\/p>\n
Of course there was nothing new about zooming, even back then. Kees Boeke’s book Cosmic View<\/i>, published in 1957, had famously inspired two wonderful films by Ray and Charles Eames. My additions were the use of this paradigm for a general purpose computer\/user interface, and the use of powers-of-two tile storage to make it all practical.<\/p>\n
To my mind, the wondrous “Enhance 224 to 176…” scene from Blade Runner<\/i> — one of my favorite scenes from any movie — which superficially seems to suggest a Pad-like paradigm, is actually evocative of something vastly (and excitingly) different. More on that tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In her comment on one of my posts the other day, Sally plausibly assumed that my Pad zoomable interface was influenced by Blade Runner. In fact, Pad evolved from an obsession I had back in 1979 to create a portable device that would show zoomable maps, to be stored as successions of tiled images with … Continue reading “Track 45 left, part 1”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16060"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16060"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16062,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16060\/revisions\/16062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}