Looking afar, with Microsoft's WWT

by Tony Austin

Saturday, 17 May 2008

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It's a little curious that they use the term "Web 2.0" when this application runs on your Windows desktop, rather than in a Web browser. As an aside, I generally prefer desktop applications to browser-based ones, but I suppose the "Web 2.0" moniker is all the rage at the moment and understandably is here used as a harmless enough attention getter.

Anyhow, I found the UX (user experience) to be very smooth and modern. It looked very nice on my 1600x1200 resolution LCD monitor. Every now and then there may be a pause for a download before your tour (or whatever) bursts into life, but with a broadband connection this is quite acceptable. The navigation between options, the panning and zooming, and everything else about how the WWT application operates I found quite satisfying (and I tend to be extremely pedantic about such things).

If you give WWT a try, I think that you too will be impressed.

Oh, how wonderful it would have been to have an application like WWT to show the kids way back in the 1960s, when I used to teach high school Chemistry and general science. But in those days there was only restricted access to costly mainframe computers using punched card (or even paper tape) input and printed output, or maybe the earliest models of CRTs with very low resolution text-only display capabilities. A tool like WWT running on an inexpensive desktop computer would have been pretty much unimaginable back then: in the realm of Science Fiction, or at best just a "twinkle in the eye" at a very few advanced research facilities.

Ah, science teachers have it easy these days. (Oops, there I go, upsetting yet another constituency!)

The accompanying snapshot shows me in the process of zooming in on a galaxy to see the effects of interstellar dust:

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope -- beginning the Dust and Us tour