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.
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