Microsoft Announces the World Wide Telescope
February 28th, 2008 Posted in Astronomy, Blog Post
Microsoft recently announce that they will be releasing the World Wide Telescope in Spring 2008. According to their site,
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.
WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.
There are a few videos at their website with some commentary from astronomers and educators lauding this as the next great thing in astronomy. Personally, I think this will be an excellent homeschooling resource and I can’t wait for it to be released. I haven’t seen an screen shots except for a really small one that appears on their FAQ page (pictured above). I haven’t heard anytiing about cost but I suspect there will be a free online version and a pay version with additional features.
Update:In an article on ZDNet, Larry Dignan quotes a talk given by Jonathan Fay in 2007 at the Table Mountain Star Party. In it Fay says,
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project is designed to be an extensible learning and exploration environment which integrates hyperlinked rich media narrative with a seamless multiple survey virtual sky to enable guided and unguided exploration of the universe.
Cool. Very cool.
Update #2: A video preview of World Wide Telescope from TED 2008.
Update #3: Robert Scoble has a lengthy article on his blog about WWT and why it made him cry.
