HD View is an image viewer to aid in the display of very large images. Advances in techniques for stitching digital images together has led to the creation of images of gigapixel size. Many of these images are panoramic or in full 360 degree fields of view. Since monitors are capable of displaying only a few million pixels at once, only a small portion of a gigapixel image can be viewed at any time. Also, images with wide fields of view are distorted to be saved as 2D files, causing viewing distortions.

Developed by Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...

's Interactive Visual Media group, HD View uses current graphics hardware to provide smooth panning and zooming of images and to handle the transformation of a panoramic image back into the appearance of a natural 3D

Stereoscopy

Stereoscopy refers to a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by presenting two offset images separately to the left and right eye of the viewer. Both of these 2-D offset images are then combined in the brain to give the perception of 3-D depth...

 illusion. A viewer can also zoom into surprising details in an image or zoom out to view the entire 2D panoramic image.

HD View is available as an ActiveX

ActiveX

ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....

 browser component, making it only available to users with Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

. Versions are available for the Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

 and Firefox browsers.
Content for viewing can be created by the public and distributed on the web.

External links

• Microsoft Research HD View - The Official Site of HD View