Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'WWT'

WorldWide Telescope Escapes to the web!

Jonathan Fay — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Well we have done it now. Just like sky-net, we have broken the bonds of installation and hopped on to the web.

Last week we announced our preview of the new WWT Web client. The web client not only allows access to a large part of WWT's functionality without having to run a full setup, but it allows access to a whole group of new people.

Intel Mac User
User who don't want to take the time to install a download.
People whose machines don't meet the minimum system requirements.
Users who want a one-click experience from web sites to view images or tours.
When Moonlight 2.0 is available, Linux users will also be able to come to the party.

One of the coolest aspects of the new Web Client is that almost all the Sky, Earth, Planet and Panorama functionality runs nearly identically, with the same 3D spherical experience as in the Windows Client.

Having the web version allows you to create a link to WWT with our GOTO and ShowImage links that almost anyone can instantly see without having to wait for a client install.

We are also have our SDK documentation underway and will be soon posting preliminary drops of them for feedback. This will make it much easier to build solutions of your own using WTML, Communities and the new WWT Web Control.

There are still a number of surprises in store when we have our feature complete release the Web Client so stay tuned.

Jonathan

WWT at TechFest on NYTimes.com

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The NYTimes.com article by Ashlee Vance, included a great picture by Stuart Isett for The New York Times showing the dome that was put together for TechFest to demonstrate the planetarium projection mode of WWT as well as the gesture interaction from Andy Wilson and Hrvoje Benko.

Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Hrvoje Benko demonstrating a Microsoft projection system that lets people manipulate large video images with their hands.

Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future - NYTimes.com

Microsoft Research TechFest 2009

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Today is the first day of the MSR TechFest 2009 – a showcase of MSR technologies – you can see pictures from TechFest. One of the demos I’m loosely tied to is Interactions with an Omni-Directional Projector – which utilizes WorldWide Telescope projected on a dome with gesture interaction. The neat part about it is that it brings together the great interaction (hands) work from Andy Wilson and Hrvoje Benko from the Adaptive Systems and Interaction and Jonathan Fay (no relation)

TechFest is much like a Science Fair – booths to demonstrate new algorithms, discoveries, etc. Great place to wander and dream what the magic of software can do….

TechFest 2009

TechFest is an annual event that brings researchers from Microsoft Research’s labs around the world to Redmond to share their latest work with Microsoft product teams. Attendees experience some of the freshest, most innovative technologies emerging from Microsoft’s research efforts. The event provides a forum in which product teams and researchers can discuss the novel work occurring in the labs, thereby encouraging effective technology transfer into Microsoft products.

TechFest 2009 - Microsoft Research

Using Flickr for Astronomy – and viewing in WWT

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The use of online services such as Flickr to help scientists is in its infancy and applications utilizing commodity based solutions will continue to pick up momentum. I especially like the integration and the ease of use – science should be about discovery and exploration – not about the technology. Of course the ability to view those analyzed images in WorldWide Telescope completes the circle and allows you to view the image in context.

Check out the Orion Nebula.
After it opens up – click on the thumbnail at the top.

You can also add your own – check out Dinoj’s post on the WWT Data Blog - Sticking images on the sky with WWT. For fun you can see the crown for the Corona Borealis overlaid on the sky

See the article written by Frederic Lardinois on ReadWriteWeb.

The Great Gig in the Sky: Using Flickr for Astronomy

Flickr hosts a wide range of beautiful images, but a new project built on top of Flickr's API only focuses on photos of the night sky from amateur astronomers. The Astrometry.net project constantly scans the Astrometry Flickr group for new images to catalog and to add to its open-source sky survey. At the same time, this project also provides a more direct service to the amateur astronomers, as it also analyzes each image and returns a high-quality description of the photo's contents.

The Astrometry group currently has over 400 members, and as Christoper Stumm, a member of the Astrometry.net team, told the Flickr Code blog, the back-end software uses geometric hashing to exactly pinpoint and describe the objects in the images. When you submit an image to the Flickr pool, the robot will not just respond with a comment that contains an exact description of what you see in the image, but it will also annotate the image automatically.

While a lot of members of the Astrometry group use high-end telescopes and cameras, the Astrometry.net solver can also analyze images from consumer-level digital cameras.

While just being able to automatically analyze and catalog these images is pretty cool already, every description also contains a link that displays the image in Microsoft's WordWide Telescope.

Astronomy is one of those few scientific disciplines where dedicated amateurs can still make major discoveries and this is definitely one of the cooler applications of Flickr's API that we have seen in a long time.

The Great Gig in the Sky: Using Flickr for Astronomy - ReadWriteWeb

WWT Academic Development Kit

dinos — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

We have put out a couple of tools for people to convert their own data to WWT format. You can process pictures of individual objects in the sky using WWT StudyChopper, and low and medium resolution panoramas, planetary textures, and sky surveys using WWT SphereToaster. You will still have to put the files created on the internet yourself, but once you do that, they will be accessible using WTML files to other WWT users.

The tools can be found from the MSR Downloads page here. They are both installed with a single installation file.

Once you install the WWT Academic Development Kit, you can access it from your Start Menu :

Extensive documentation is found in the equivalent of your folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\WWT-ADK\doc . Or you can just have a look at the manuals here: StudyChopper.pdf , SphereToaster.pdf .

Caveat: This is an alpha version.

The Earth, Stars, and Planets in 3D

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

One of the coolest new features of the WWT Solstice Borealis Beta (released at the beginning of Jan) is the ability to see the Earth, Stars, and Planets in a stereoscopic 3D effect. I’ve been using the Anaglyph mode (View | {arrow} | Stereo | Anaglyph) which uses the stylish red/cyan glasses shown below to not only look at the Stars, but you can zoom all the way out and see the lattice structure made up galaxies of the universe. Checking out the planets, like Mars, Saturn, etc is also very impressive. Going down to Earth, you can change your perspective by holding down the ctrl key and then you can fly into objects like Mount St. Helens

Mount St. Helens in normal view Mount St. Helens in stereoscopic view

Check it out if you have a pair of red/cyan glasses – they are all the rage :-)

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit Release -Microsoft Research

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

With this ADK, users can convert their own astronomical images/data to the format that can be read by WWT and share with other WWT users. Can’t wait to see more images/datasets made available.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit, January 2009 Release

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) Academic Development Kit, January 2009 release contains two utilities that enable people to convert their astronomical images, panoramas, sky surveys, and planetary textures to a format that can be read by WWT and shared with other WWT users. It produces image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. WTML files are XML files in the WWT format that point to the images on the Internet and store details of how they are to be displayed in WWT and metadata such as image title and credits. The WWT SphereToaster Tool enables users to provide images in an equirectangular format that covers all or part of the inside or outside of a sphere. This includes, for example, cylindrical projections of panoramas and all-sky surveys. SphereToaster converts these to a different projection system—the TOAST system, currently unique to WWT—and then stores an image pyramid of the resulting TOAST-projected image. The tool also produces thumbnails and WTML files. The WWT StudyChopper Tool enables users to provide photographs of small parts of the sky, such as a high-resolution image of the Crab Nebula, and enter appropriate coordinate information and metadata. It creates image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. Once the output image pyramids and thumbnails are hosted by the user's servers and the WTML files are made available to others, anyone with access to the WTML files will be able to browse the images in WWT.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit, January 2009 Release - Microsoft Research

WALL•E's Universe in WorldWide Telescope

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Now this is fun science - Microsoft Research and Disney•Pixar team up to offer guided tours of the universe with WorldWide Telescope – how better to get our children interested in science and the universe – for most of us it was the Apollo Missions that interested in science and space, now WALL•E is a good ambassador.

WALL•E's Universe

Explore the Universe with WALL•E and Andrew Stanton. Zoom, pan, spin and learn about planets, constellations, stars and galaxies.

© Disney/Pixar

WorldWide Telescope

Running Tours in a Loop (WWT Kiosk Mode)

dinos — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Suppose that you have a screen on which you want WWT to play one or more tours in a loop. This is often the case in a museum or planetarium setting, but eye candy is of use anywhere.

The first thing to do is to set WWT to play tours in a loop. In the image below, we choose the All option. (Note: Choosing the One option allows you to play a single tour - which could be a local .wtt file - in a loop.)

At the moment, WWT only allows you to play tours in a WWT-provided collection of tours in a loop. Suppose we decide to play New Tours in a loop. Choose the New Tours folder from the Guided Tours tab.

Click on the New Tours folder.

Click on any tour in this collection. It will start playing. (You might want to press F11 to make it go full screen if it isn't already doing so.) When it finishes, it will go on to play the next tour in the collection. Your job is done.

WWT Equinox Beta out today!

dinos — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Today, the WorldWide Telescope gets an update ... a major update. Just have a look at this screenshot...

That's right - WWT has gone 3D. You can fly through the Solar System now! And keep flying out, out through the hundred thousand stars in the Hipparcos Catalog, out further till you see (a model of) the Milky Way. Many users will be able to zoom even further out and enjoy the beautiful filaments-and-voids structure formed by half a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, one of the main projects that Jim Gray – to whom WWT is dedicated – collaborated with astronomers on.

With the 3D mode, you can see how the moon casts a shadow on the earth during a solar eclipse, zoom into Saturn’s rings, and witness just how far from the center of the Milky Way we are. And, yes, you can make tours using this enthralling new mode.

Speaking of tours, they have multi-level undo and animation now – text and inserted images can expand, contract, move, spin, fade, etc within a slide. That makes storytelling a lot easier – and a lot more fun as you try to get just the right effect. When you've installed WWT Equinox, try this Apollo tour (disclaimer: yours truly made it) for an example of a tour with lots of animation. You can also cut and paste from MS Office applications.

WWT is also going worldwide … linguistically. It is now possible for you to create localized versions of WWT. For a start, we’ve done Simplified Chinese during the course of a project with Microsoft Research Asia and the National Astronomical Observatory of China. If you’re an astronomy-savvy user who would like to translate a few hundred strings of English into a different language, please email wwtpage@microsoft.com … we may take a while to get back to you since our small team in the Next Media group of Microsoft Research will be swamped in the next week.

There’s more data to look at, with hundreds of new images from the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer space telescopes, as well as from renowned astrophotographer Jack Newton. We also have new surveys in the ultraviolet (GALEX) and gamma-ray (Fermi) domain, as well as an updated set of sixteen surveys about the Cosmic Microwave Background from the WMAP Science Team.

Remember how the WWT Spring Beta had just four panoramas of Mars? We’ve ramped that up – there are now over fifty. Some are even in 3d, so get your red-cyan glasses out! They are mostly from the Cornell Pancams on the NASA/JPL Spirit and Opportunity Rovers, but also from the 2008 Phoenix Lander and the earlier Pathfinder missions. But it’s not just Mars – we’ve got the Moon too, with half a dozen panoramas stitched at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Ames Center from the original Apollo astronauts’ photographs.

If you have your own panoramas or photographs that you’re itching to get into WorldWide Telescope, hold on a week or two – we’ll have some simple utilities for you to get your data into WWT. You can, of course, already play with WWT’s inbuilt manual image aligner.

What else? Various bug fixes, check. Also - several features that will only be used by power users, niche users, and users who stumble upon them by accident. Like cone searching with NED (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database) returning results as VOTables, textures on Saturnian and Uranian moons, Earth globes where you can see polar regions, panoramas of telescopes at Mauna Kea, pressing F11 to enter and leave a full-screen mode where you can revel in the brilliant blackness of pure sky, saving to Desktop wallpaper, changing planet sizes between Actual and Visible, using a Xbox Controller or 3d Connexion Navigator, going to locations defined using coordinate systems other than J2000, and … more.And there are more tours and stories, some of which really showcase WWT’s new touring abilities.

Watch this space for more documentation and tools. You can also start thinking about how you would like to organize your own community – what data would you like to host? How will you moderate data uploaded by others in your community? In the next couple of weeks, we will provide further details and stories about some of the datasets and features you’ll find in this release, so that we can credit the many wonderful people in science, education, and outreach with whom we worked to get this release out to you.

To try it out, please go to the WorldWide Telescope website.

And please send your comments, positive and negative, to wwtpage@microsoft.com - and check out the forums first.

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