Advice on implementing a zooming interface?

[chombee]

That email again with the line wrapping fixed.

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I thought this list might be a good place to ask for advice.
                                                      
I have tested a paper + card version of a prototype story writing
tool with children, and now need to implement a computer version
of the prototype. I don't have my interface mockups handy, but it
is card-based story writing. Imagine looking down at a set of 10,
20 or 30 or so "story cards" on a table, you write a bit of the
story on each card. The interface needs to be able to provide a
zoomed-out overview of all the cards, and to zoom-in on each
individual card, and the cards need to have text entry widgets on
them for the user to input their story (they also need text labels
and images).
                                                      
I initially envisioned the 2D cards existing in a 3D scene with
proper, animated, continuous zooming. This isn't really necessary
though, the zoom is rather used to connect a fixed number of
discrete screens, so it could be implemented more like in Sugar,
where you don't actually see an animation of the zoom happening.
                                                      
Initially I thought to use pygame for the implementation as I knew
I could use this on an XO. But I have looked around, and the GUI
toolkits I can find for pygame seem a bit limited. A text input
area widget is missing from pgu, for example. And I'm not sure I
would be able to place GUI widgets onto sprites (the cards) with
any of the toolkits I saw, they all seem to allow a 2D interface
to be overlayed on the game scene but not integrated *into* the
scene, whereas I have been imagining my story cards as sprites in
a game scene and the GUI widgets being on the cards themselves.
                                                      
The most promising, in fact the only workable option I've found,
seems to be the 3D game engine Panda3D, and its DirectGUI library.
I believe it would allow the cards to be implemented as flat
objects in a 3D scene and allow GUI widgets to be placed onto
these objects in the scene. But a full 3D engine may be overkill.
                                                      
Does anyone have any advice on how I could implement this, and
hopefully make it OLPC compatible, either using pygame or
something else?
                                                      
Thanks