Microsoft announces May 2008 startup of WorldWide Telescope

William Atkins
Monday, 12 May 2008 17:58

Your IT - Home IT

Designed in part by Jonathan Fay and Curtis Wong and developed by the Microsoft Research Laboratory at Microsoft Corporation, Worldwide Telescope is expected to be more powerful and more comprehensive than Google Earth.

Wong talked at the TED conference in February 2008. His talk, along with the talk by Roy Gould, is found at: “Ted Talks," along with biographies of the two men. Gould is a researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics (Massachusetts, U.S.A.). Wong is the manager of Microsoft's Next Media Research.

According to the Microsoft Research website “WorldWide Telescope,” “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.”

In addition, “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.”