When you get a new technology like Seadragon, you first work out how to get it out there in the hands of people who can use it in anger, and then you incubate it.
In the case of Seadragon, Blaise Aguera y Arcas first showcased it very publicly at TED last year. Since then, the team at Microsoft Live Labs who own the technology decided on an approach to making the technology accessible and available to developers, and now they've also extended it out to others too.
Silverlight 2.0 gave developers access to this technology in the form now known as DeepZoom, which is a sub-set of Seadragon functionality - but still plenty of functionality for the uses we're putting it to with our eCommerce clients and others.
PhotoZoom is an application written by Matt at Live Labs, and it's an incubation project, meaning that the application itself provides an easy accessible interface for the less technical likes of you and me so that we can easily see the potential of the technology, and tailor it to be appropriate to our clients. It's purely an incubation project today, so don't expect it to deal with albums over 100MB in size, or to have all the interface niceties and error trapping you'd expect from a mature production application (although it's actually very good anyway!). I was even seeing enhancements being built on to the app whilst I was using it - nice service from Matt at Live Labs!
So step 1 - get a bunch of images. The higher resolution the better.
Step 2 - go sign in using your LiveID (Live (Instant) Messenger ID) and create an alias. Mine is PaulAtConchango.
Step 3 - name your new album.
Step 4 - hit browse, select all your images and that's it!
Step 5 - wait... this stuff does take some putting together, so you need to have some patience but it seems to be getting faster and faster by the minute!
Here's my latest - taken from all the images on Flickr tagged 'whatsinmybag'.
Enjoy! For best results, use your mouse's scroll-wheel...