Sneak Peek at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope

Ted.com has a great sneak peek at Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope project. In this video, presented by Roy Gould and Curtis Wong, you are able to see a combined view of satellites and telescopes from all over the planet and nearby space. The compiled image is rendered using Microsoft's new high-performance "Visual Experience Engine" that allows users to pan and zoom across the night sky seamlessly.

For 16 years we have provided spin...

[mattpalmer1086]

The technology looks very cool, but Microsoft just can't resist spinning even where there doesn't seem to be any need at all. Check out the FAQ at worldwidetelescope: http://worldwidetelescope.org/buzz/FAQ.aspx [worldwidetelescope.org]

Q. When did Microsoft first starting looking at the sky?
A. For 16 years, Microsoft has invested, and will continue to invest, in long-term, broad-based research through Microsoft Research. WorldWide Telescope is built on work that started with Jim Gray's SkyServer and his contributions to Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Sky Server (a portal to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) was first released in 2001. Aside from the poor grammar in the question, reading that answer just made my skin crawl...

Re:Looking up now copyright infringement

[fastest fascist]

Maybe they've got sanity projects for their programmers: let them do cool stuff, too, every once in a while. Maybe they just figure it's worth making investments on neat tech without quite knowing for sure what it will end up being used for. If anyone's got enough resources to do that, it's MS.

Lame demo or not a big deal

[daemonsito]

I'm not sure if that was just a lame demo, but that "telescope" is really not a big deal.

It's basically one of the application I already had installed in my Linux box for years, but only with a bigger database. That can surely not be accounted as an invention, and certainly not as big an invention as the telescope 400 years ago.

How is different from Google Sky?

[mario_grgic]

Google Earth has had something like this for a long time now. Is this any better or is it just an expression of Microsoft's fear of Google and need to "me too" everything Google does?

even worse

[nguy]

The guy who founded the company has been filing a dozen patents on obvious ways of doing image zooming and multiple level of detail rendering. Buying the company, Microsoft got the software, the patents, and they also established that the patents are valuable.

These people are real sleazeballs.

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Blaise+Aguera+y+Arcas&btnG=Search+Patents [google.com]