One difficulty with continuous zooms, is you lose context. "Was Earth 10^6 or 10^7 meters?" "Are viruses bigger than bacteria, or smaller?"
One alternative is to chunk the zoom. If I ask you, how big is a soda can, you're not going to wave your hands with a factor of 2 error - you've handled them, and have a feel for their size. Similarly, if you repeatedly hear stories at some scale, like 1000x, with cardboard box salt and M&M red blood cells, those sizes become familiar too. The first "How to remember sizes" section of my crufty page[1] has some illustrations (mostly clips from failed user-test videos).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 9.8 ms ] threadOne alternative is to chunk the zoom. If I ask you, how big is a soda can, you're not going to wave your hands with a factor of 2 error - you've handled them, and have a feel for their size. Similarly, if you repeatedly hear stories at some scale, like 1000x, with cardboard box salt and M&M red blood cells, those sizes become familiar too. The first "How to remember sizes" section of my crufty page[1] has some illustrations (mostly clips from failed user-test videos).
[1] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms Extremely crufty and slowwwwwwwly loading - it wasn't originally intended to be public.