Silverlight 3.0 PlaneProjection (with DeepZoom)

I previously built a rather gratuitous PlaneProjection demo flipping around a Silverlight Map Control. A slightly more useful (or at least interesting) use of Silverlight 3.0 PlaneProjection is this Deep Zoom 'tile pyramid visualizer'...


[fullsize image] [try it out]

Rather than just play around with the RotationX and RotationY properties,

• GlobalOffsetZ is used to 'push back' the larger images to sit 'behind' the smaller, foremost image
• CenterOfRotation is set to GlobalOffsetZ * -1 so that all the images rotate around the same point
• RotationY is then used to rotate them all together

Here are some diagrams to explain what that all means:

Firstly, each 'layer' in a Deep Zoom image is double the the size of the previous one (height/width) so when they three layers are rendered on top of each other, you can clearly see the size differences:


However when we apply the PlaneProjection to move the larger images along the Z axis (ie. in/out of the page) we can create the effect that all three images are the 'same size'.

Altering the PlaneProjection attributes listed about let's us zoom and rotate the pyramid to get a totally useless but kinda cool looking view of a Deep Zoom tile pyramid...

UPDATE: For those without Silverlight 3.0 installed, I've recorded (my first!) screencast demo (sorry it's in Flash - something to figure out another time...)