Last year we wrote an in-depth feature on Pivot, a Microsoft Live Labs technology that helps make sense of interconnectedness between objects on the web. The underlying premise of Pivot is to view relationships between “collections” of individual information on the the web. Many of the connections between items on the web aren’t necessarily tangible, but Pivot helps crawl massive amount of objects on the web and produces sleek visualizations of all that is connected. Today, Microsoft is using the technology to power Silverlight PivotViewer, which is now available for download. PivotViewer lets the user visualize thousands of items at once and then organize and navigate them within a rich media application.
Pivot and Silverlight technologies are the core of the PivotViewer. Developers and designers can now use Silverlight PivotViewer to build collections and embed them on their websites. Using the Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight 4, you can zoom into high resolution content and pan around to find what you’re looking for.
PivotViewer’s collections combine large groups of similar data that connects a series of isolated pages. Live Labs will continue the Pivot experiment to continue to develop new visualizations for large collections of information.
A number of sites are already using the technology for rich media data visualizations, including Hitched, a wedding planning site in the UK (see screeshot below).
Pivot isn’t the first compelling technology to come out of Microsoft’s Live Labs. Photosynth, a graduate of Live Labs, is an impressive photo viewing project that stiches together images to create pseudo-3D worlds.
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
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