Surf3D. Blogmapper. Map Bureau. Extisp.icio.us - kliger. Piccolo Home Page. A Structured 2D Graphics Framework Welcome to Piccolo! A revolutionary way to create robust, full-featured graphical applications in Java and C#, with striking visual effects such as zooming, animation and multiple representations. Piccolo is a toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs, in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), in particular. A ZUI is a new kind of interface that presents a huge canvas of information on a traditional computer display by letting the user smoothly zoom in, to get more detailed information, and zoom out for an overview.
We use a "scene-graph" model that is common to 3D environments. Basically, this means that Piccolo maintains a hierarchal structure of objects and cameras, allowing the application developer to orient, group and manipulate objects in meaningful ways. Why use Piccolo? What exactly is it? Media Research Lab. For the last decade the MRL has lead research efforts in Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs).
These interfaces create an intuitive information landscape - the user moves "further away" to get an overview, or "closer" for more detail, while keeping a sense of orientation and structure that traditional "pop-up" windows and dialogues can't match. Following Ken Perlin's initial "Pad" project (and patent with Prof. Jack Schwartz), a number of systems have been developed. "Pad++" was developed in collaboration with Prof. Ben Bederson and Prof.
James Hollan at the University of New Mexico, and resulted in a non-exclusive license to the Sony corporation. "Tabula Rasa" was developed by Prof. Ongoing MRL work in this area includes ZUIs for the web and handheld devices, with uses ranging from complex software controls to authoring and reading structured documents. Zooming Pad Demo Pad Web Navigation Demo Patents PAD patent. Lg3d: Project Looking Glass. Workspace3D par Tixeo Soft. The SphereXP. Research - Graphics and Visualization.