Navigation, interactive interfaces, multiscale interfaces, zooming, authoring, information navigation, hypertext, information visualization, multimedia, world wide web. It directly supports creation and manipulation of zoomable graphical objects and navigation within a zoomable workspace. Such changes in view we call semantic zooming . It provides, for example, a simple method for representing abstraction. When you zoom out, you see a simplified rendering of the object, and when you zoom in, you see more details.
Animations interpolate in pan and zoom to bring the view to the specified location.
If the end point, however, is more than one screen width away from the starting point, the animation zooms out to a point midway between the starting and ending points, far enough out so that both points are visible. The animation then smoothly zooms in to the destination. This gives a sense of context to the viewer and helps maintain object constancy. In addition it speeds up the animation since most of the panning is performed when zoomed out and thus covers more distance than panning while zoomed in. An example is NCSA's Mosaic system.