Powers of Ten Thousand

“How would you interactively browse a very large display space, for example, a street map of the entire United States? The traditional solution is zoom and pan. …When changing locations, sequential applications of the zoom-in and zoom-out operations may become tedious. This paper proposes an alternative technique, the macroscope, based on zooming and panning in multiple translucent layers. A macroscope display should comfortably permit browsing continuously on a single image, or set of images in multiple resolutions, on a scale of at least 1 to 10,000.”