Zooming user interface

Information elements appear directly on an infinite virtual desktop (usually created using vector graphics), instead of in windows.

[1] Some consider the ZUI paradigm as a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI, being a Post-WIMP interface.

The term ZUI itself was coined by Franklin Servan-Schreiber and Tom Grauman while they worked together at the Sony Research Laboratories.

GeoPhoenix, a Cambridge, MA, startup associated with the MIT Media Lab, founded by Julian Orbanes, Adriana Guzman, Max Riesenhuber, released the first mass-marketed commercial Zoomspace in 2002–03 on the Sony CLIÉ personal digital assistant (PDA) handheld, with Ken Miura of Sony In 2002, Pieter Muller extended the Oberon System with a zooming user interface and named it Active Object System (AOS).

Apple's iPhone (premiered June 2007) uses a stylized form of ZUI, in which panning and zooming are performed through a touch user interface (TUI).

[9] It is not a full ZUI implementation since these operations are applied to bounded spaces (such as web pages or photos) and have a limited range of zooming and panning.

In 2017, bigpictu.re offers an infinite (pan and zoom) notepad as a web application based on one of the first ZUI open-source libraries.