Microsoft's Silverlight at Hard Rock

Online interactive applications that allow you to consume and interact with data visually always impress me. As a user, i just think it is cool and it distracts me from the boring text blobs i am mostly interacting with. But as someone concerned with delivering all types information types to users, i am also always curious because i know that these technologies will continue to enhance information delivery and how users will expect to interact with data regardless if they are at work or play.

I was catching up on the Mix08 news this evening and saw this live site of Microsoft's Silverlight Deep Zoom technology that allows users to browse photos of Hard Rock's multimedia collection.This gets filed in the cool folder.

Aside from being able to zoom in on the promo wig from the Rolling Stones 'Some Girls' album you can also zoom into Keith Richard's strange Italian Guitar with built in speaker and Bob Dylan's 1991 Harley Davidson Soft Tail Custom Motorcycle among a lot of items of interest.

I wonder if there is plan to overlay music as well- perhaps an integration with some of the online music providers would be interesting. It however doesn't seem to be indexed by their search tool because i did a search on Bob Dylan and the motorcycle did not come up although other Dylan memorabilia did - the text is there within the object description (putting aside the topic of image search itself) so maybe that is just an oversight on their part at the moment.