Microsoft Research digitises AIDS Memorial Quilt

Microsoft recently compiled a digital version of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which aims to remind everyone of the people who have succumbed to the AIDS disease. The physical version of the AIDS quilt exists in separate pieces, but if it was put together in one place as a unit, it would take up 23 acres and weigh 53 tons.

The organizers of the quilt had previously taken images of it, with the images totaling 55 GB and having over 49,000 individual quilt panels. Donald Brinkman writes in the Microsoft Research blog about Microsoft's involvement in putting those images together and making them available to anyone that has access to a web browser: "To cut and stitch the virtual quilt, we could use Windows Azure to create cloud data stores and run stitch/unstitch scripts across multiple cores. To zoom and explore the quilt, we could use a combination of Silverlight Deep Zoom paired with both Large Art Display on Surface, for a high-fidelity experience, and Bing Maps, for a cross-platform experience. Finally, to dynamically reconfigure the quilt, we could use PivotViewer".

According to Brinkman, over a dozen people voluntarily worked on the project. "Within a week, they had a proof of concept up and running in Bing Maps, enabling you to be one of the first people in the world to view the quilt in its entirety," Brinkman adds.

You can view the image in its entirety here.