What is Enhanced Zoom

What is Enhanced Zoom?

To zoom out further and further on a map means loading more and more map tiles into memory and compressing the image in real time to fit on the screen.

Enhanced Zoom is a system of pre preparing zoomed out map images and having these zoomed out layers available for display.

Is this a new technology?

No. The likes of Google and Microsoft have been using this sort of technology for a long time. If you work with either in a web browser, as you zoom in and out you can sometimes watch the map tiles being rendered to the screen.

Why has Anquet adopted this technology for OMN 2017?

As with many technical decisions there are pro’s and con’s.

By creating Enhanced Zoom map layers, we have to prepare more data, and that data has to be downloaded or supplied on USB key. A map with a full set of Enhanced Zoom layers will take up about double the disk space of the original non Enhanced Zoom map data set.

So the main negative of this technology is it uses more disk space and takes longer to download.

However, the positives are that these zoomed out map layers can be easily loaded into memory and displayed, using much less processor power and therefore giving a more reactive system and one that will by virtue of using less processor also consume less battery on mobile devices.

For the technically minded:

If you are technically minded, Microsoft has a very technical developer document about its Bing Map Tile System which between the coding provides an interesting read on this subject.