"Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.
The four "promises" of Seadragon:
Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
Transitions are smooth as butter.
Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.
The Seadragon team is currently tuning its DirectX implementation, making the most of the new Windows Media Photo format, and cranking on the Photosynth Technology Preview.
http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx
We were shown demos of this project during the MS MVP Summit by the Live Head Dr Gary Flake, and they were simply awesome !!!