Zoom, zoom, zoom: Underwear, UFOs and Buzz

A picture can be worth 1,000 zooms. Move Inc., the company that operates Realtor.com and Move.com real estate search sites, has announced that it plans to incorporate gigapixel imagery of cityscapes that allows users to zoom in -- and zoom in again and again -- to see more close-up details of the panorama image. Think: extreme HD for digital photographs. It's a lot like those coin-operated telescopes at tourist destinations, only the images are not live. And they don't cost a quarter.

Here's a description of the technology. Basically it's a process of stitching together highly detailed images into a massive "zoomable" image, without the need to load up the entire image all at once. Here's a list of some sites that feature this imagery.

The photos in this blog post include an image of Oahu and a zoom-in shot of surfers from that same image.

During a meeting with company investors last week, Realtor.com president Errol Samuelson demonstrated the imaging technology by zooming in on an image of the San Francisco skyline until the city's famously curvy Lombard Street was on display.

Real estate looky-loos will likely love this stuff, right? But will such technologies lead more people to buy or sell homes or help them to find homes or neighborhoods?

It is one of those, "Oh, cool," technologies that is sure to lead to Internet chatter about quirky incidents captured on camera -- maybe a guy will be spotted on his balcony wearing underwear, or a speeding motorist will be captured on camera running a red light. Google, Microsoft and Amazon's a9.com stirred a buzz with their various versions of street-level photography for some city areas. Curiosity seekers have spotted some interesting day-in-the-life digital snapshots captured by the trolling truck-mounted cameras.

It was the same with the launch of overhead imagery on the Web -- there were reports of UFOs spotted in Google's aerial images. Of course, such imagery can lead to privacy concerns: Do we have to shutter our windows when the camera vans drive by to avoid becoming an Internet conversation piece? Regardless, it gets people talking. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

Conversation pieces can be a boon for online traffic, clicks and community chatter, and so perhaps it's no wonder that Move is moving in this direction. Company officials said during the investor event last week that they are trying to bridge the gap between search and social networking by launching an array of new tools and features (see Inman News article).

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