draggable magnifying glass on your map

My colleague Ji Yang recently developed some neat code to implement a movable magnifying glass or "microscope" that reveals more details on any spot on the map, without zooming into the map itself.

You can download the simple HTML page that implements this effect here. And here is the icon referenced in the page. The demo works off the sample MVDEMO data set.

The code simply uses the MVMapDecoration and other standard Oracle Maps JavaScript API. The basic idea is to create a duplicate set of MVMapView handle and theme-based FOI layers for the DIV container that serves as the microscope window. Then add this window as a movable Map Decoration object to the main map. The map and themes in the microscope window show things at a different zoom level from the main map to achieve the "amplifying" effect.

Anyway, here is a quick screen shot with the magnifying glass spotlighting on two different locations on the same map.