The PAD Project at the MRL has spent the last decade leading research efforts in Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs). These interfaces create an intuitive information landscape - the user moves "further away" to get an overview, or "closer" for more detail, while keeping a sense of orientation and structure that traditional "pop-up" windows and dialogues can't match.

Following Ken Perlin's initial "Pad" project (and patent with Prof. Jack Schwartz), a number of systems have been developed. "Pad++" was developed in collaboration with Prof. Ben Bederson and Prof. James Hollan at the University of New Mexico, and resulted in a non-exclusive license to the Sony corporation. "Tabula Rasa" was developed by Prof. Perlin's early Pad collaborator David Fox, and made dramatic advances on the "magic lenses" they presented in their 1993 SIGGRAPH paper on Pad. Jon Meyer, NYU's lead developer on Pad++, later developed a Zooming Graphics Library, allowing zooming Java applications to take advantage of OpenGL hardware. Zooming content systems have also been developed including Athomas Goldberg's "PADCAD" project, Prof. Philip Benfey's "BioPad" (for explaining the development of Aribidopsis thaliana), and Noah Wardrip-Fruin's "Gray Matters" (a storytelling system that first demonstrated a method of zooming navigation suitable for single-button mice or touch screens).