At MIX08 one of the projects I helped along the way was the Hard Rock Memorabilia site developed by Vertigo to show off the Deep Zoom capabilities in Silverlight. These are the guys who also released the great Silverlight Codeplex Slide.Show project that I’ve used a couple of times.

What I discovered recently is that they’ve shared another project on Codeplex to help make your life easier. This one is called BigPicture^tm and it helps by providing a lot of the basic framework for building a Silverlight Deep Zoom app. Now you still need to get your hands dirty with the Deep Zoom Composer and Visual Studio… but this gives you a real headstart.

BTW while we’re on the subject Jon Galloway (also from Vertigo) has written a great breakdown on how Deep Zoom compares to some other solutions and fellow evangelists Laurence Moroney and Jaime Rodriguez (both far cleverer than I) have posted some great write-ups on how to develop Deep Zoom apps in Silverlight.

If you build (or know of) a cool Deep Zoom sample please share it in the comments here.

If you’ve had a look at the amazing Hard Rock Memorabilia site that Vertigo built for the MIX08 Keynote (and then put live for good measure) you’ve probably been impressed at how easy it is to zoom in and out of the dynamically re-arranging collection thanks to the Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight.

Although it’s pretty astounding to think that Deep Zoom facilitates the delivery of megapixel and even gigapixel images that can be panned and zoomed into with amazing speed (and low bandwidth consumption) the story doesn’t end there.

Thanks to a concept called sparse images it’s possible to embed images and collections within another image so you can continue zooming down past the point where pixels blur into entire new worlds or collections – it makes the imagery almost fractal in depth and navigation possibilities.

So where can you see it in action? Simple … go to the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and have a look around. To give you a clue I’ve included a picture of what you’re looking for with this post, but if that isn’t enough then have a look here (but don’t you want to try finding the Easter Egg first…).