Zooming user interface
graphical interface allowing for image scaling
In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ee) is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) on which users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different documents. Information elements appear directly on an infinite virtual desktop (usually created using vector graphics), instead of in windows. Users can pan across the virtual surface in two dimensions and zoom into objects of interest. For example, as the user zooms into a text object, it may be represented as a small dot, then a page thumbnail, then a full-size page, and finally a magnified view of the page.
ZUIs use zooming as the main metaphor for browsing through hyperlinked or multivariate information. Objects present inside a zoomed page can, in turn, be zoomed themselves to reveal further detail, allowing for recursive nesting and an arbitrary level of zoom.
Researchers have described the ZUI paradigm as a Post-WIMP interface and potential successor to the traditional windowing GUI.
The term ZUI was coined by Franklin Servan-Schreiber while working at Sony Research Laboratories, in partnership with Ben Bederson and Ken Perlin of New York University.
History
In 1962, Ivan Sutherland presented the first program for zooming through and creating graphical structures with constraints and instancing, on a CRT in his Sketchpad program.
A more general interface was developed by the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in the 1970s. Hand tracking, touchscreen, joystick, and voice control were employed to control an infinite plane of projects, documents, contacts, video, and interactive programs.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zooming user interface” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.