Zoomorama Blog

How to Promote a Theater Play with Zoomorama

2009-10-28T19:24:11+01:00

Theaters in Paris are starting to use Zoomorama for a more effective promotion of their shows. They can easily create a collage with the poster, some photos, and a video teaser. Then the collage can as easily be picked up by bloggers, or even ticketmaster for direct presentation where potential customers are.

Simple and Effective, keywords for Zoomorama !

See here a zoomorama for an upcoming show of a play by Moliere, Tartuffe, directed by Laurent Delvert.

The Beautiful Princess is OFFICIALLY a genuine Leonardo da Vinci

2009-10-21T15:40:50+02:00

The $20,000 painting discovered in a flea market is now worth more than $100 Million after the experts have declared it a genuine Leonardo da Vinci !

Timothy Clifford, the foremost specialist on Leonardo da Vinci wrote this in the Times of London:

"With Peter Silverman, I visited Pascal Cotte at Lumiere Technology who is doing pioneering work using his unique multispectral scanner. He has discovered that the tightly spaced follicles of the parchment would suggest it is made from the skin of a lamb and that the drawn surface has undergone a certain amount of abrasion and restoration that one would expect from a drawing of a considerable age.

Using the scanner one could see more clearly than with the naked eye that the shading passed from the upper left to the lower right in Leonardo’s usual distinctive manner. A sliver of the parchment had been subjected to tests by the Institute of Particle Physics in Zurich, which dated it to the range 1440-1650.

After my visit, a fingerprint was found in the chalk that corresponds with that appearing in a Leonardo painting of St Jerome. So, as far as technology is concerned, the drawing seems to have a remarkably clean bill of health. What is so exciting is that no drawings by Leonardo on parchment are known, although we do know from the Codex Atlanticus that Leonardo was interested in the technology of drawing, in color, on vellum." READ Full Article.

More than a year ago we had the privilege of publishing for the world this new painting, still uncertified, called Profile di Bella Principessa - Profile of the Beautiful Princess - courtesy of Jean Penicaut, CEO of Lumière Technologies. They relied on Zoomorama to show the world the full glory of the painting in 80Mpixels.

View the Painting in HD here

Here are the news reports from around the world about this fantastic news that we had announced to you before anyone else ! View the news in FRENCH here. Go to Lumières Technologies web site for all the articles.

Horses of Qatar, the Zoomorama

2009-10-04T20:35:41+02:00

We have been honored by the request of famous photographer Vanessa von Zitzewitz to use Zoomorama for the promotion of her new book and exhibit on the Horses of Qatar. The exhibit just opened at the "Petit Palais" in the heart of Paris and received rave reviews (read article in Le Figaro (French)).

Vanessa is one of the world's top commercial photographer, working for Cartier and Boucheron, among others, but also a famous portraitist who got Karl Lagerfeld, Carla Bruni, or Sean Connery to pose for her. She has spent two years on this book, taking more than twenty thousand pictures to take advantage of the unprecedented access into the secret world of the Emir of Qatar.

The Exhibit runs until October 11th in Paris.

See here the Zoomorama for Horses of Qatar. (view full screen for an enhanced experience)

But Vanessa is also a generous donor of her time and money to a orphanage in Thailand that takes care of kids with AIDS. Every year she spends personal time taking care of the kids herself, as well providing invaluable financial support. She published a book about the orphanage, with beautiful and touching photographs.

See here the Zoomorama for the Thai Orphanage "Slaughter House Angels"

Thank you Vanessa for your beautiful work, and for choosing Zoomorama !

Darty Improves its Product Pages with Zoomorama

2009-09-22T20:08:11+02:00

Darty.com, the e-commerce site of the famous French electronics retailer, offers Zoomable product images with Zoomorama. This trial run is currently only for SLR cameras, which allows customers the freedom to explore every detail of cameras through a extremely simple interface.

Customer can navigate seamlessly between shots of different angles, and zoom on each image. Every feature of the camera can be explored. Zooming to close up offers a feeling of touch when the texture of the camera becomes apparent.
The pop-up is using Flash, so it can also be toggled to full screen for an even more powerful experience ever closer to the e-commerce holy grail of "having the product in your hands".

VISIT HERE the Darty.com SLR Camera pages. Some cameras don,t have zoomable images yet, in that case the former "regular" pop-up is published.

The beauty of Zoomorama's solution lies is the simplicity of its back-office implementation. Darty.com did not have to change its back-office, nor modify its code. It simply provided Zoomorama with an XML feed to its images and product descriptions which our Web Services then transform into Zoomable images. Then a litte PHP magic formats all the content into a templated document. When the pop-up is opened on Darty.com it automatically fetches the document as a Flash embedd. The URL says Darty.com but all the content is fed from Zoomorama's servers. It all seamless and transparent for the customer.

We will be demonstrating the Zoomorama solution at the upcoming Paris e-Commerce conference, taking place on September 29-30 and October 1st. Come visit us for a personalized demo, as well as some more advanced e-commerce solutions. We will be at Booth D09.

Operational side-to-side comparaison with SeaDragon

2009-09-16T22:07:58+02:00

Studying the United States legal code using computers is a field of its own ! So large is the code that to get some prespective the "Computational Legal Studies" Blog posted a 43MB poster of the United States Code. When the Code is formally organized into 50 titles, it is the repository for federal statutory law. While each of the 50 titles define a particular substantive domain, there structure can be represent as a graph/network.

At first they published the poster using ZOOMIFY, but it was not really a smooth visual experience which takes away from the pleasure of exploration, then they used Microsoft DEEPZOOM for smoothness but not everyone has Silverlight installed. In the end they settled for ZOOMORAMA for smoothness and maximum accesibility thanks to our Flash viewer.

Here is what "Computational Legal Studies" Blog wrote about Zoomorama:

"Above we offer the same visual of the United States Code (Titles 1-50) which we previously offered (using MS SeaDragon) this time we are using Zoomorama. Zoomorama is an alternative to Seadragon which we believer might perform better on certain machine configurations.

Essentially, we do not want people to miss out on the visualization simply because their computer does not feature the necessary software/plugins. While some class of endusers still might not be able to view either version, we hope this alternative version will maximize the chances that it would be visable.
Thanks CLS for the great operational return of experience.