The goal of Deepfish, the Live Labs team said, is "preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens."

Microsoft debuted the new tool on Wednesday at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California, and said that a limited test of the program would be available to people who sign up on the MS Deepfish Web page at labs.live.com/deepfish/. The software giant is currently describing Deepfish as a "technology preview," something that the Live Labs site admits is "a few releases from beta quality."

In an interview Wednesday with Microsoft's own PressPass office, Dr. Gary William Flake, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and director of Live Labs, said that the Deepfish technology solves the problem of accessing desktop-sized content through much smaller mobile devices.

"With the Deepfish technology," Flake said, "we capture the full layout of the page and deliver it to the mobile device, resulting in an experience similar to that on the desktop."

Zoom Box

Unlike ZenZui, which requires Web content providers to create specialized "tiles" of information, the Deepfish technology would allow mobile users to access existing Web pages. After entering a page's URL, users see a thumbnail image of the full page. By moving a "zoom box" around the screen, users can select content that they want to see in more detail, and the software then zooms in.

Deepfish also will enable users to pan around a Web page to view content, or zoom back out to navigate more quickly.

"Because the layout is preserved," the Live Labs development team said on its blog, "navigation menus, lists of search results or news headlines, and other elements that might have been bent so thoroughly to fit the usual single-column layout that they were no longer legible can now be browsed simply and easily."

Deepfish is limited to devices that run the Windows Mobile 5 operating system. Flake said that the Live Labs team is not planning to announce when or if the Deepfish technology will be more widely available, or ported to other mobile devices.

Microsoft Live Labs

Deepfish is one of several projects percolating in the Microsoft Live Labs, a research partnership established in January 2006 between MSN and Microsoft Research, the R&D branch of the software giant first founded in 1991.

According to a press release issued by Microsoft at the time, Live Labs is intended to be "an agile environment for fast-tracking research from the lab into people's hands."

Other Live Labs projects under way include: Photosynth, a tool for compiling large numbers of photographs into zoomable 3D image; Seadragon, a project designed to reshape the way information is displayed on screens, regardless of their size; and Entity Extraction, a technology already built into the Windows Live Toolbar to help surfers find information related to the web page they are viewing.