<h2>General Information</h2>

An *(acronym) for Zoomable *(User Interface). The basic idea is to have a map of the  represented information and allow the user to zoom in and out. A zoomable interface has a relatively high information density. In fact, zoomed all the way out from the dataset, all of the information is visible and modifiable (not necessarily in a usable fashion).

<h2>Advantages:</h2>
<ul>
 <li>Spatial navigation</li>
 <li>Natural hierarchy (nested objects)</li>
 <li>High information density (needs strong visual cues to not turn into a disadvantage)</li>
 <li>Visual pattern recognition (with a well-designed _(GUI))</li>
 <li>High visibility when zoomed out</li>
</ul>

<h2>Disadvantages:</h2>
<ul>
 <li>Tunnel vision (only documents spatially close to each other visible at the same time, might be helpful to have sticky documents or another view; map)</li>
 <li>Probably high amount of resources needed to work on the datasets (all documents on a terabyte RAID visible at once, needs LOD)</li>
 <li>High amount of repetitive navigation work, though usually less than with _(WIMP) Explorer-style file managers</li>
</ul>


<ul class="links">
  <li>_("Introduction to ZUIs"|http://www.eecs.utoledo.edu/rashmi/research/zui_intro.html);</li>
</ul>

<ul class="implementations">
  <li>_("Pad++ Zoomable Interface"|http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/);</li>
  <li>_("Piccolo & Jazz web site" |http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/) a Java implementation of Pad++;</li>
  <li>_("Denim"|http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/) demo for PC/mac;</li>
  <li>_("2GoTo.com"|http://www.2GoTo.com/) an infinite Plane Fly-through ZUI, flash 100k, imports content from independent servers, works on phones/handhelds/PCs/macs;</li>
  <li>_("Jef Raskin - ZUI Demo"|http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/zoom.html): zooming is an important part of _(The Humane Environment);</li>
</ul>
