A colleague of mine recently attended the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference (TED) over the last weekend. On his return, excited by what he had seen he emailed me a link to the Microsoft World Wide Telescope programme run out of the MS Research Labs in San Francisco and Redmond. The application looks to me to be a catch up with Google Sky, taking hi-res images from ground based and space based telescopes and stitching them together to form a geographic whole.
The advertising for the application shows a pretty cool run through of the application and the zoom and slew looks pretty slick, although this could be down to the size of machine that is running the application as apposed to the application itself. From a first view of functionality it seems well established. For example, in the Flash movie presentation they comment on building your own routes through the stars and being able to send this to friends.
The above video is the TED presentation by Roy Gould of Harvard Centre for Astrophysics and Curtis Wong of Microsoft. The application itself is an extension of the work originally begun by one Jim Gray at Microsoft on the SkyServer application. A copy of the original research paper can be found here.
All-in-all it looks like a good competitor to Google although I have yet to experience the application on my machine. I'm waiting for it with excitement though.
2 comments:
Post a Comment