NASA was established more than 50 years ago and has been a world leader in studies of our home planet. In October 2005 NASA decided to share their series of the stunning 'Blue Marble' images. The satellite photos were divided into 12 calendar months and provided a detailed overview at an entire year in the life of our planet.
Each image took up 10 Gigabytes of hard disk space. To be able to understand how much 10 Gigabytes really is, you can think of that each image consists of 5000 pictures taken with a typical digital camera.
Two years later they are probably still the largest zoomable images ever seen on the Internet. Thanks to advanced zoom technology it is possible for NASA to manage and study our earth by images using any Internet connection.
During the recent years it has become possible to buy expensive products over the Internet. You can buy everything from clothes, cars to expensive furniture. Unfortunately you still have to make a decision for the product based on one or a few images - often in poor quality.
Several studies have shown that the most significant barrier in modern e-commerce is the lack of quality product images - more specific the lack of sufficient image details or resolution. Customers can't "experience and feel" the products in the same way as they were holding them.
The explanation is that high quality images take up a lot of disk space and increase the download time. It is inappropriate to let Internet users wait several seconds for a high quality image each time the user is viewing a product.
Another barrier is the increasing use of mobile devices like PDAs and mobile phones. It is still too hard making a decision for a product on a 240 x 320 pixel display on a mobile phone if the product image is 1680 x 1050 pixels.
But how can it be possible to zoom even large images like NASA's 10Gb satellite images by use of an Internet Connection while webmasters are struggling to limit sizes of their web images?
By combining and re-scaling existing technologies for other purposes and goals, it has become possible to see and almost feel tiny details of any e-Commerce product in the same way as you can study every detail of even large satellite images.
E-Consultant Sonja Jacobsen explains the controversial mix of NASA technology and existing web technology "as a way to move forward in a competitive market" and "almost all e-shops will be able to present their products with zoomable pictures within 2-3 years with similar technologies".
