Just Keep Zooming In On Visuals With This Large Format Interactive Display Software
June 21, 2023 by Dave Haynes
One of the more compelling interactive display solutions I’ve ever seen made me say Oh Wow! when I first saw it 10-plus years ago, and it did that again when I saw it down at InfoComm last week.
A little Toronto company called Content Interface markets a handful of software-driven solutions for large-format displays and video walls, and the flagship is something called Infinity Zoom.
The video below shows what happens, but I’d describe it this way:
A full screen image, when pinched using a touch overlay to zoom in on image, starts to reveal the individual pixels. Pinch and zoom some more and those pixels turn out to also be images, and any of those images can be zoomed all the way to fill a screen. And pinch some more, and more pixels and images appear. It’s infinite.
I think this is very sticky, almost hypnotic content for the right situation. It’s not going to stop many people bustling along an airport or rail terminal concourse, but imagine scenarios like museums, halls of fame, corporate lobbies and medical centers endowed by philanthropists.
CEO and Founder Hao Le is a Vietnamese immigrant who started Content Interface almost 20 years ago, developing and marketing “a software engine that efficiently and quickly displayed huge amounts of digital images without the use for high-end super computers. His software engine was utilized in various applications, from managing huge image archives of major universities to developing a new method to present satellite images.”
I won’t get into the commercial pricing, as I might get that wrong, but believe it is very affordable. The code runs happily on a modest Windows PC, and there is a viewer version that runs on iOS, MacOS, tvOS (Apple TV) and Android. There is a meter on things like how much content is uploaded and viewed.
I asked Le, who was showing the software in the Ledman stand last week, where he’s been doing business, since I’ve not bumped into it in my North American travels. Most of his projects are in Japan. A Vietnamese immigrant to Canada, he also has a developer team back in his birth country.
He also has a different solution aimed at galleries and high-rez imaging that handles gigapixel visuals that users can tap, click or pinch to zoom in on. Imagine being able to view a Dutch master’s work all the way to the individual lines of brush strokes. This would also, at least in theory, be pretty interesting for aerial and seismic imaging, maybe medical and probably military.
I have no business ties to Hao. This is not advertorial. I just think it’s interesting and could use higher awareness.
This reminds me of an exhibit at the NAB SHow many years ago (30-ish) when Quantel started their presentation with a 1080 HD image on a (very large) screen and proceeded to zoom out to demostrate the actual size of their “canvas.” By the end of the process, the 1080 image was the size of a postage stamp… As I recall it was many millions of “Pounds”… also very cool, given the state of the tech in the early 1990s