WorldWide Telescope Unveiled
Microsoft officially unveiled the WorldWide Telescope, its software that allows anyone to see, for free, the entire universe and navigate the cosmos in an exciting interface. WWT works a lot like Google Earth, just with a 3D universe spanning thousands (or many more) of light years, letting users zoom all the way into incredibly distant galaxies and view the universe in multiple wavelengths.
There isn’t much information on the official WWT site, but there are videos of some people talking about it and a short FAQ.
Here’s a video from a talk yesterday at the Computer History Museum where the speaker discusses the computing infrastructure required for WWT. Fast forward to about 1 hour 19 minutes. Be warned, the sound is awful:
This year old CNet video has two seconds of WWT footage, about 2 minutes 30 seconds in:
