At last March's Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in Monterey, CA, a summit that's been described as "Davos for the digerati," the calm-voiced software architect from Microsoft began his demonstration abruptly, navigating rapidly across a sea of images displayed on a large screen. Using Seadragon, a technology that enables smooth, speedy exploration of large sets of text and image data, he dove effortlessly into a 300-megapixel map, zooming in to reveal a date stamp from the Library of Congress in one corner. Then he turned to an image that looked like a bar code but was actually the complete text of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, zooming in until two crisp-edged typeset characters filled the screen, before breezily reverse-zooming back to the giant quilt of text and images.

Microsoft had acquired Seadragon the previous year--and with it the presenter, Blaise Agüera y Arcas. But Agüera y Arcas had not come to TED just to show off Seadragon. Soon he cut to a pano­rama tiled together from photos of the Canadian ­Rockies; the mosaic shifted as he panned across it, revealing a dramatic ridgeline. Next came an aerial view of what appeared to be a model of a ­familiar building: Notre Dame Cathedral. The model, Agüera y Arcas explained, had been assembled from hundreds of separate images gathered from Flickr. It was a "point cloud"--a set of points in three-dimensional space.