Zooming user interface
A Zooming User Interface or ZUI is a graphic environment and a radical but fairly evolutionary outgrowth of the graphical user interface, or GUI.
In a zooming user interface directories and programs are not present within windows but are placed instead (in vectorial form) directly on an infinite virtual desktop. A user navigates through the virtual space by panning left to right and up and down, as when one uses a video camera, and by zooming into objects of interest, as when one uses the zoom function in a video camera. At one point in the zooming process an object of interest can look like a small speck, at another point it can look like a thumbnail of a page of text, and at still another point it can look like a normal size page of text or a magnification of a page of text.
The longest running effort at a ZUI has been over the Pad++ project started by Ken Perlin and Ben Bederson at New York University and continued at University of New Mexico. After Pad++, Bederson developed Jazz and later Piccolo at at the University of Maryland. The most recent ZUI effort has been The Humane Environment (THE) by Jef Raskin. This incarnation of the ZUI concept is Open Source software.
The ZUI is the new interface paradigm which is receiving the most attention and effort in the contest to come up with a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI. However, since the total amount of investment in building a successor to the present GUI is rather small, the effort in developing ZUIs is proportionately humble. Each year hundreds of millions of Euros are spent on making small changes on existing GUIs (in desktop format or within Web delivery), while a much smaller amount is spent on significantly new interfaces and a smaller one still is spent on developing ZUIs.