Microsoft releases Seadragon Mobile for iPhone
While Microsoft and Apple may be bitter rivals in the desktop market, it hasn’t stopped Microsoft Live Labs from building its Seadragon Mobile advanced image viewer concept for the iPhone. But why didn’t Microsoft create the Seadragon viewer for Windows Mobile handsets?
Seadragon Mobile was developed to provide viewing of 3-dimensional images on the iPhone from any perspective. It extends the ability to view panoramas created by Microsoft’s new PhotoSynth application.
PhotoSynth lets you build these 3-D Synths by shooting a scene or object from dozens of angles. Once you load your pictures into the application, it weaves the images together to render the scene from virtually any view.
Microsoft announced the release of Seadragon Mobile to the iTunes App Store over the weekend. The move has prompted a lot of people to question why Microsoft Labs would have chosen the iPhone over Windows Mobile as the platform for Seadragon.
One could argue that the iPhone is a more ideal platform than Windows Mobile for manipulating images in 3-D. The iPhone’s zoom and natural screen navigation makes its users more likely to be comfortable using the application.
The iPhone’s hardware is also geared specifically for multimedia applications. The large screen and dedicated processing power help ensure a more consistent user experience than is possible on a Windows Mobile phone.
However the iPhone’s features don’t justify Microsoft’s departure from its own mobile operating system platform for experimental applications. There are Windows Mobile phones that are certainly capable of offering a similar experience for Seadragon Mobile users.
For example the HTC Touch line now offers a large touch screen interface with a VGA display. This 400 mhz phone should match the image-viewing performance of an iPhone almost precisely.
Further, if Microsoft’s own Labs team doesn’t feel that the Windows Mobile operating system is worthy of developing experimental applications, then maybe they are focusing on the wrong initiative. Instead, the Live Labs team should work on improving Windows Mobile’s stability and interface from its position as industry laggard.
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December 18th, 2008
There is very little to no WM phones today that can handle what Seadragon probably needs.
First of all, it can be guessed that it requires a high-powered FPU for all the graphics scaling work.
NONE of the current high-end WM/Android phones have one ESPECIALLY the ones that went with the Qualcomm MSM72xx.
Not only that, but having a FPU enabled OS is nice, and WM isn’t one in CE5 nor CE6.
Currently, the iPhone has the best CPU, GPU (2D+3D), and FPU available with an OS built with FPU-enabled GCC, sadly we have to admit.
Then, there’s eyes. iPhone has the App Store, and #1 popularity besides being current #2? phone in the world market.
There is no better platform to deliver all that R&D for Seadragon.