#polymaps

Polymaps is a free JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps in modern web browsers.

Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.

Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.

With the amount of media consumed online at an all time high, there is an existing increase in novel interaction and data processing techniques to provide users with compelling user experiences. One of the biggest challenges is displaying large collections of media, because of the bandwidth and processing power challenges they present.

By leveraging the performance of PolyMaps we created a web media browsing interface that aims to solve these problems with an interactive zoomable interface. The key idea is lazy loading each movie "tile" so that it doesn't really matter how big your data collection is, unless you zoom all the way out, that is.