Google Maps like nagivation of images

Viewing images on the Web is not always very user friendly, mainly because Web Browsers do not allow arbitrary zooming and panning in images.

A more and more common way to solve this problem is the use of JavaScript with custom nagigation of images, using concepts such as pyramidal organization of images.

A well known implementation of this concept is Google Maps.

While not directly related to very large images, because zooming does not refine information (images are not so-called very large), an interesting work has been conducted by Siva Dirisala, on a variety of Nasa images.

By using more and more of these ideas, we should expect more and more very large images (and more generally all images) to be really in-place zoomable, a nice addition to content of Web pages.