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Imagine Google Maps for individual images. Or Gigapan, without loading delays. Or Silverlight Deep Zoom, for Sony products, with video. Or, or, or…just watch Sony’s High-Res Enlargement Engine on video, because a moving picture’s worth a million words, roughly.

This pan’n'zoom effect, which gives Playstation products an easy, seamless way to navigate mindbendingly huge images, is part of a new library that’ll be seeding out to developers before too long, though it’s not clear exactly what for. It’s a novel way to navigate a brochure, or a massive, stitched panorama, or even a comic-strip-type storyboard, and the addition zoom-triggered video content gives it a discernible advantage over similar technologies we’ve seen before, but how exactly could you incorporate this into a game?

At any rate, I hope someone figures out the answer, because this is kind of amazing: Every time the dude in this video dives down by another 10 zoom factors, I literally feel like I’m falling. [Diginfo via Engadget]