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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.
why don't they just combine it with DRM and get the full packages - watching us, watching them, watching us...
From Wikipedia's entry on Google Sky (which sites two articles on the matter): Google Sky is believed to be less expansive than its competitor WorldWide Telescope from Microsoft, which is regarded as significantly better.
This article has got to be a hose. I mean, Microsoft doing something both useful and cool?
Well, as they say: even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then...
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
D00d, I luv the way you say "Linuzz" instead on "Linux", and "Abble" instead of "Apple" (even if I don't really get "Abble") but you missed the obvious and oh-so-original "Open Sores" line that cracks me up everytime.
Back on topic, Google have already done this, Celestia have already done this (and Celestia is free software - sorry, "open sores"), so what's *not* to bash about Microsoft (damn, that should be M$) arriving late to the party? What does Microsoft bring to the party that we don't already have - in spades - already? Fanbois?
I know, I shouldn't feed the troll, but it was so cute, sitting there under the bridge...
This is where the serious fun begins.
How is this different from Google Sky?
Google sky is from Google and the worldwide telescope is from Microsoft.
hth
A. 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 to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®'s high-performance Visual Experience Engine(TM), 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. Couldn't find the same about Google Earth (Sky): Explore the sky with Google Earth
Whether you're an astronomer or stargazer, Sky in Google Earth brings millions of stars and galaxies to your fingertips.
I think maybe it's more like Google Sky.
Curtis Wong explains what you can do, 5.15 into the video. Before that it is a load of boring talk about how it will allow us all to explore the universe and increase our understanding, etc but with some cool pictures of what you can expect to see from the world wide telescope. It will be a free download this spring from http://worldwidetelescope.org/
I for one, am looking forward to this. I'm sure someone will ask if it can run on Linux. I've no idea, but I can't see it being that hard for Wine to get it working.
In related news Microsoft has issued a press release indicating that users looking up are taking revenue from Microsoft, who now owns the copyright to 100% of the sky. "As we all know DRM is a critical issue today. If people could just look up any time they pleased there would be no need for our new software. Innovation would be stiffled and we have scientists who say the sky might fall." said Microsoft product manager I M ATwat. "For many years we at Microsoft have endured casual astronomers looking up at the sky, and focused our efforts at prosecuting only professionals. However, today we will be launching an education campaign aimed at educating the public about the legal dangers of looking up. We are launching a new tool SGA - 'Sky Genuine Advantage' which will inform the user that piracy is illegal and won't be tolerated. Delivery will be via Microsoft Blimp. We at Microsoft look forward to providing our users with legal computerized views of the sky for a very reasonable price."
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Looks a lot like the also free Celestia:
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestia
Most likely M$ is just trying to get more people to install 'Silverfish', you can pretty well bet that it will be locked to it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I believe it's using the Photosynth engine. I think the beauty of photosynth is that it is a self organising system for seamlessly navigating between photographs that gives you the illusion of animation. Microsoft's system can crawl web pages for material to add to the collage. So it does seem to be better" than google sky as this system will be allowed continue to collect images published in astronomical papers and add these pages to the world wide telescope system.
Make no mistake about it Photosynth is a world changing technology.
Microsoft searching for heavenly inspiration on what to do with Vista?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Or, you know, you could use Celestia.
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...
This looks awfully familiar... http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html/
I've been very lucky to see this project from alpha to present because one of friends interned with the group and introduced me to them - its gone through some amazing development - I remember seeing this I think early 2007 - it looked more like Stellarium than anything else but just plane black with solid circles for stars and galaxies. It took forever to load images when you zoomed in. Must have crashed about 30 times in a five minute demo.
Jonathan Fay (of MaximDL fame) showed it off at Table Mountain Star Party last year and they'd moved from that sky to a synthetic pre-rendered sky that would transition to real images from Hubble or other sources as you zoomed in.
Saw it again at the American Astronomical Society Meeting this January in Austin and really got to play with it since they were right alongside the Harvard IIC booth. It was the first time they were using real imagery for the entire sky and it looked amazing and Jonathan was touting the tour facility.
Its biggest trick in my mind though you didn't see in the video - one little slider that takes you from the Optical to the Infrared and Microwave and X-Ray sky. Simply blew me away.
It already supports VOTable and FITS images and dozens of other formats that astronomers use and are becoming standards for enthusiastic hobbyists. You can take your own images and put them up on the same sky as data from Chandra or Swift or the best ground based data from MMT or Magellan or Keck. Now it starts to get really useful. The CfA at Harvard has been digitizing its old plates of sky images, Pan-STARRS will start operating sooner rather than later, SDSS has a ton of data already and LSST will be up in a few years imaging the entire sky every few nights. This is a monstrous amount of data and the system really gives you a way to search through it all very intuitively. I'd love the ability to click on a star in the sky and have all known spectra of it pop up along with references. Not quite there yet but it will be.
This also makes it the best educational tool. There are projects like Las Cumbres and several schools and colleges have access to telescopes so this gives you a great tool with which to look at data and take your own data and do it in a way that doesn't require you learning how to use NED and SIMBAD and looking for papers on ADS. But I think the biggest thing it does is just blow you away with a sense of how large everything is, or perhaps how small you are in relation and I think that is a very powerful idea. I remember the first time I saw the Eames Power of Ten video - this takes that to a different level and is genuinely thought provoking.
Quite simply the best thing I've ever seen out of Microsoft.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Actually I don't believe it's using silverlight, which is a pity for linux dudes out there because whilst there is Linux support for Silverlight, I don't think there's linux support for Photosynth. Guess, you'll just have to be content with Google Sky ;)
...kindly RTFA: it consists of actual imagery, not a model of the imagery like Celestia... (karma whoring: off)
Microsoft didn't invent it. They bought it.
I think the thing that really ticks off the tech community about Microsoft, is that they don't really invent anything, they're just extrordinarily good and spotting excellent software early on, acquiring it and then marketing it better than any other company out there.
RTFS
Privacy is terrorism.
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.
Why, isn't it obvious? It's Windows-only. As far as Microsoft is concerned, that's a big advantage. For everybody else...
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?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
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
Make no mistake about it Photosynth is a world changing technology.
Yes, it is, but it isn't new. It's nice that Microsoft has a cleaner and better implementation of it now and that better hardware makes it look smooth, but it's been around for nearly as long as images and networks.
exactly how will this help me find and/or download porn? Wake me up when Microsoft buys the guys who invented the worldwide porn telescope, then I'll be impressed.
Taken from the web, eh? I hope they consider copyright issues then...
This MS product does indeed sound very similar to Google Sky.
I think the difference between both of these and e.g. Stellarium/Celestia is the database that sits behind them. Usually "planetarium" software consists of a bunch of points for stars, with perhaps a few objects represented by pixels. You can upload images but you have to do it yourself.
In contrast, Google Sky (and presumably the MS telescope) show you pixels from large databases such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The latter covers roughly 1/4 of the whole sky.
Google is heavily involved with the LSST project.
MS has been involved in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for quite some time via the late Jim Gray.
Its great for astronomy that both of these companies are competing in an area with little prospects for "monetization".
On a related note, Jim Gray, the researcher behind the WorldWide Telescope, recently went missing on a sailing expedition. The search has already been suspended.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
As soon as I heard him say "holistic" I hit the back button. Learned a long time ago the term holistic us usually a codeword for inane bullshit.
I don't see MS using patents as a weapon, only for FUD and defense. I know that's kind of like saying the dragon only uses his teeth when close, but it's still true.
Personally, I'm not that worried about patents. Being sued usually presupposes a certain level of affluence and comes with the territory. As a citizen of the USA, I'm am worried. The patent for 'Scanning a check and exchanging information about the scanned check' is going to cost everyone money and make a few people rich. It about makes me sick.
Are you suggesting burning the land and boiling the sea are also in MSFTs plans?
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
I've been working with images and networks for a long time, and I've never seen anything that could even claim to do what Photosynth does automatically and seamlessly.
These patents will likely be challenged if Microsoft tries to enforce them; I'm sorry, but you'll have to do your own prior art searches.
Saying that computers *could* do something for a long time is nothing like having a product that actually does those things through a seamless user experience.
That's quite right. And their implementation is quite nice. But good engineering and coding doesn't warrant a dozen patents.
Google also acquired many of their recent products, including Google Earth. If these big companies want to buy all of this stuff and release it to the public for free, however, I'm not going to complain :)
Well, maybe the database is bigger. Or not. Oh, and you can switch the view to infrared and radar.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I hate to be so reactive to the things I have recently seen, but I wonder what would happen if you exposed this system to the autistic community? It seems like a lot of data that would do well to be digested by someone predisposed to taking it all in at once.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
> Make no mistake about it Photosynth is a world changing technology.
Finally! The cure for cancer? No? What, solves world hunger? Peace for mankind? Not even a better aspirin? What you say, a neat imaging trick? Your world must be very small.
From what I saw in the video, it looks no different the Google Sky, yet the guy sounds like he thinks it will bring a revolution. It's just another Microsoft copy of someone else's idea.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
I tried it, but all I could see was the Blue Sky of Death !
this has been in design at microsoft since 2002. read the paper yourself anti-microsoft-boy: http://research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2002-75
-mr silver
I've got to try that sometime.
"Are you suggesting that [bad thing]"
More like Microsoft DRM Information wants to be free FUD You cannot steal an idea, only infringe on it SCO Intellectual Property is evil P2P They stole Apple's idea and manipulated them into giving them copyrights OOXML Convicted Monopolist! So yes, [bad thing], for quite some time.
Microsoft will give this technology away, which requires their software which you have to purchase additional Windows server software for. Google will give their technology away and as a way to build their brand and reputation and your trust in them so they can more effectively deliver ads to your eyeballs.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Well, Google Sky loads stuff off various servers all the time as you pan and zoom into the map, just like Google Earth and, probably, MS Virtual Earth or Nasa WorldWind do. So, with the buzzwords stripped, I can't find anything substantial in your post about what's so different, let alone "world changing", in WWT. But maybe that's just me.
Call me a luddite, but I really don't like flash.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Technically, no company invents anything. It is always people that invent things. Often those people are paid by companies to invent things. Does it really make a difference if they pay the person before the thing was invented or afterwards?
"We can see all the way out to the edge of the observable universe." ...is that so? Amazing.
Check out the home page of the WWTelescope.
Is anyone else feeling absolutely creeped out by the "kids react to WWT" video?
Acquisition is a legitimate tool to expand your business, this will sound like I'm avoiding naming names but there are some organisations that really help the open source movement that include several acquired companies... err I think Sun was one.
And in terms of user experience, this is different from any of the leading planetarium software in what way?
Do anything, anywhere, anytime.
Will it run on Linux? No?
Ho Hum.
You're the one making the claim that this has been done before. Either prove it, mention a company/product, link to something or simply don't say anything.
Why? Is this a court of law? A peer reviewed journal?
I don't give prior art for patent claims in public; it just makes life of the patent trolls easier, Mr. Anonymous.
>>Galileo's invention was universe-shattering
Not exactly his invention, suggest you do a little history review. Refining it and how it was used and the observatons discovered by his 'telescopes' are what is important.
Galileo was brilliant, scary brilliant, but even he 'embraced' and 'extended' technology. I suppose this now makes him a fraud and evil in your eyes?
PS I don't dispute Galileo's contributions; however, I would make a really good side bet that MORE people in the world know 'Microsoft' than know 'Galileo' - Even though this would be very sad, even though it is probably true.
Ok, I am not anonymous (though not the one above). Can you give me a link to a competing product that already does what Worldwide Telescope is doing? Or else you are just trolling?
That's the wrong question to ask, since the patents aren't just on the "world wide telescope", they are on much more basic technologies. Why don't you actually read them?
Google Earth does what the world wide telescope is doing. It also does on-demand multi-resolution downloads of image data (as did Google Maps even), which is what some of the patents are actually claiming.
Oh, and of course, you're also anonymous. But based on your posting history, it seems likely that you work for Microsoft.
Hahaha, accusing me of working at Microsoft while I do not even live in America. But anyway Google Earth and Worldwide Telescope did not work the same way. Terraserver, created by Jim Gray (that missing sailor who works with Microsoft) was created even before Google exists. Can you show me where Google is in 1997? Did not exist yet IIRC. Good luck finding prior arts in this one buddy.
I do believe you meant "Sorcerer's Stone."
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Don't worry, it'll all be Silverlight soon enough!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.