And I'd love help with a search query. Can't figure out the right words to avoid links about restoring old photos, or details of various MS Photos applications over the years.
Here is the research paper on PhotoMesa: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson/images/pubs_pdfs/p19-khella....
And here's a YouTube video of PhotoMesa: https://youtu.be/CQYDhnBMoF0?si=SOWUcjSFyv47nfrt&t=59
Also, as a researcher who has studied and implemented Semantic Zooming, the original post (probably inadvertently) makes it sound like Underkoffler invented the idea. I'd have to double check things, but I believe it was Ben Bederson (also the creator of PhotoMesa above) and Jim Hollan that invented the concept of semantic zooming in their seminal work Pad++, which aimed to explore alternatives to basic GUI interfaces. Ben has a lot of papers looking at zooming interfaces for photos, presentations, calendars, and other visualizations.
Here's the paper on Pad++ https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/192426.192435