Microsoft Israel R&D center upgrades Deep Zoom Advertising

in News by Gal Mor — June 22, 2010 at 8:13 pm | 1 comment

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Microsoft Israel R&D center has just released a technology preview of Deep Zoom Composer, a tool to allow the preparation of images for use with the Deep Zoom feature currently being previewed in Silverlight 3.

The new Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight allows users to see images on the Web with smooth in-place zooming and panning. Deep Zoom and Deep Zoom Composer tool allows the user to control and zoom on High resolution images deployed in Silverlight 3.

Deep Zoom Composer, codename Headlight, also introduces an end-to-end interactive experience within a single advertisement. Through visual zoom, a click on an ad becomes a click to explore multiple layers of information, all nestled within the ad.

With Deep Zoom Advertising, advertisers promote user-centric interactions, and publishers keep users on their sites. The new experience is accompanied by a design tool for creating the zoom ads. Microsoft claims that this technology also makes it easy for advertisers and agencies to track and monitor ROI from their campaigns; user-interaction tracking events are embedded into the ad object. Headlight was initially released to Microsoft Downloads in July 2009.

Microsoft released Silverlight 3, the latest iteration of its alternative to Adobe Flash technology, on June 10th.  The Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight 3 went live on the Microsoft Download Center on July 9, 2009, and is now officially available. Those already familiar with the Deep Zoom Composer and associated Silverlight feature will be able to notice that Microsoft has introduced quite a few new features with the latest iteration of the technology.

Using Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight 3 users will be able to add links to images. In this regard, the tool supports adding both links that point to other pictures in the same canvas put together with the Composer and hyperlinks that point to external destinations. In addition to links, Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight 3 also enables users to add menus to their content.

The latest release of the Composer also comes with support for Sideshows. Users now have the option of displaying Deep Zoom images in a slideshow running inside a browser. All images that are added to a Deep Zoom Composer project can be viewed in the “Images” tab just like in previous version of Deep Zoom Composer. Once the user drags/drops the images onto the artboard they are displayed in the “Layers” tab.

Microsoft will be demonstrating its DeepZoom ad technology at Cannes using a mock campaign for Klondike bars, made by the festival’s Advertiser of the Year Unilever. The idea is that consumers will be able to zoom into an ad and unveil a new world that boasts a game, user-generated videos and a freezer filled with different kinds of the ice cream bar. Then, consumers can zoom in even more to see the nutritional information and other product facts without going back and forth among pages. They can chose to play the game, whatever that entails or watch the adventures of the video creators. The idea is that this interactive ad experience will help boost things like brand likeability, favorability and recall.

Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight 3 is available for download here.

Tags: Advertising Deep Zoom Composer featured Microsoft Israel R&D center Silverlight