Seadragon is Microsoft’s first iPhone App. Voice Search Next?

Monday, December 15, 2008

Sea dragon has been released by Microsoft on Saturday. It is the first iPhone app from Microsoft, the giant company with a mobile platform of its own, Windows Mobile. Seadragon describes itself as an image browsing application for the iPhone. It is also originally the graphics engine for Microsoft’s Photosynth, which allows users to stitch photos together into a faux 3D environment.

The release of Sea dragon aims to demonstrate the possibilities in mobile platforms and to introduce Photosynth to iPhone users. Its release info touts the ability to browse large quantities of high-resolution imagery smoothly right on your iPhone.

The app includes thousands of images online to explore. Some of them are really cool. Take a look at the pictures below. At first, you may think it is just a picture of people, but as you zoom closer and closer, it appears the building blocks of this pictures is made of soda cans!

At the soda can level, the images still looks exceptionally clear and crisp. It was amazing!

So why hasn’t this app shown up on other phones first? Microsoft product manager states that most other phones do not have accelerated graphics ability built in them, and iPhone allows Microsoft to accomplish what they couldn’t have done before.

What’s next for Microsoft? Rumors say that Microsoft’s Voice Search is coming soon in a few months. But Haven’t Google already done that?