Zoomorama Blog

Darty Improves its Product Pages with Zoomorama

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

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.

2010 United States Federal Budget in Full Details with Zooming

Jess Bachman, creator of the now famous Death and Taxes poster depicting the US Federal Budget, relied once again on Zoomorama to present his poster. With Zoomorama to show all the details we hope to sell more posters than with a regular presentation.

On Twitter Jess (mibi) wrote: "preparing the Death and Taxes zoomorama today. Is there a better zooming application out there? I doubt it.". Thanks Jess for the nice words ! We hope you sell a lot of posters

This year we added a "Quick Find" menu, implemented with simple CSS. There is not programming in the implementation, just notifying in the ZML (Zooming Markup Language) the area of focus associated with each menu entry. Done in no time. Here is the CCS for the left side menu:

.leftpan-hover:hover + .leftpan {
  -zm-transition-duration:0.2;
  -zm-transition-timing-function:linear;
  -zm-transition-property:left;
  left:0;
 }

Anyone cares to make it any simpler to create of pop-up menu ? 
You can access the full ZML (Zooming Markup Language) of the page by clicking HERE.

Another nifty idea is to send a view by mail, not just the poster but the actual part of the poster that you want to share. Simply zoom to the part you want, to to "Menu" at the top right, and click on "send to a friend". The URL in the reciptient's email will have the correct focus when he opens the poster. Try it !

Soon we will allow anyone to do the same on their own, using XML, CSS, and Javascript. Just a few more weeks of patience !

BBC relies on Zoomorama for a new generation of art experience online

The BBC launched today a mini site using Zoomorama's technology to accompany its new television series "Desperate Romantics". The paintings featured in the series can be explored in full details while listening to an audio commentary.

Go visit the site, in full screen for a  better experience: http://www.bbc.co.uk/desperateromantics/paintings/

Chris Hellowell, Managing Director of Cogent Design in charge of the project for the BBC writes: "Zoomorama’s unique technology opens up an exciting new world of creative opportunities. It is easy to integrate with Flash so our in house programmers are off to a flying start.”

Cogent and the BBC wanted a highly fluid zooming function  that could easily integrate within a Flash movie containing audio, multiple selectors, and which could easily go full screen. It also needed to be fully CDN compatible so the whole world could enjoy the experience.

Zoomorama responded perfectly to their special needs. What we delivered is a blueprint for all museums on how to share their treasures with the online public. Simple to implement, and delivered on Flash for full cross platform compatibility !

We are proud and honored to have delivered a great project for the BBC. We hope you enjoy it.

 

Servers Upgrade at 9:00am EST Thursday the 9th of July

We are upgrading our servers, and migrating at the same time on a new web architecture for improved performance, and easier maintenance.

There will be a 10min service interruption at 9:00am eastern standard time today, Thursday July 9th.

Sorry for the inconvenience. We hope you will enjoy the new performance level of our service.

Let us know if you experience any problem after the upgrade.