But Pad also supports the radical notion of being infinite in extent and resolution. It can be placed at any location and at arbitrary scale.
Navigation is performed by zooming in and out and moving around the surface.
Our metaphor for searching for information is that all the information is there and to see more detail, you just have to take a closer look. Using Pad is meant to feel like you have a gigantic piece of paper that you can look at with a microscope with arbitrary resolving power and smooth zooming. Our focus in this implementation has been to provide smooth zooming in a system that works with very large datasets. In many applications, speed is important, but not critical to functionality. The searching strategy is to visually explore the dataspace, so it is essential that interactive frame rates be maintained.