Deep Zoom without Silverlight
In a move that I wouldn’t have bet a dollar on, Live Labs released a purely JavaScript Deep Zoom client. You read that right, what was so far one of the nice features only found in Silverlight is now available in an open web, standards-based version.
Of course, from a technical standpoint, Deep Zoom is just commoditizing what Google Maps made possible years ago in pure script so there wasn’t really a reason why this couldn’t be done, except smoother transitions and zooming but that’s pretty tenuous.
The great thing about this new library is that the tools to create the Deep Zoom image are exactly the same as with Silverlight: the JavaScript client is pretty much a drop-in replacement for the Silverlight client.
Embedding the viewer into a page is YouTube-easy: give the deep zoom url and it will build the code for you to embed.
MSDN on Deep Zoom:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645050(VS.95).aspx
Everything about the JavaScript client:
http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/
Embedding the viewer:
http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/embed-viewer
UPDATE: Kapil created a Python-based tile-cutting application that is compatible with both deep-zoom clients, to work around the Windows-only nature of the creation tools:
http://blog.kapilt.com/2008/11/30/sharing-large-images-openlayers-gsiv-modestmaps-deepzoom-and-python/
UPDATE: Also check out this TED talk to get a glimpse of the true potential of these technologies (all that you're seeing in this talk is publicly available by the way):
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html