Microsoft have been demonstrating Seadragon technology and Deep Zoom for a couple of years now primarily in the form of Photosynth; the latest “Concept Tests” from Microsoft Office Labs are really starting to show some potential for day to day use within the Office suite.

Canvas for OneNote provides a single view overview of your entire OneNote notebook whilst allowing zooming, panning and selecting individual pages and direct editing via the Canvas interface as demonstrated in the video below:

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=4df5f112-f04a-490c-9d06-667126389298" target="_new" title="Canvas for OneNote Demo Video">Video: Canvas for OneNote Demo Video</a>

After using Canvas for a couple of hours it has already become the preferred way of working with OneNote and really given the OneNote application a new lease of life.

pptPlex is another play on the Seadragon technology that provides more flexibility and agility to PowerPoint slides and how they are presented and used. I tend to use MindManager for presentations where lots of information needs to be readily to hand but may use this approach from now on as the ability to zoom and pan to relevant detail as demonstrated in the video below naturally encourages the breaking out from the traditional linear narrative approach of PowerPoint and Keynote type presentations:

Other Concept Tests are available from the Microsoft Office Labs site.

Personally I find it quite exciting to see practical and working demonstrations such as this coming from Microsoft as it can only help stimulate innovation from other vendors.