Microsoft Combats Google Sky With “Worldwide Telescope”
“Google Sky rival on its way, Gates puts release within next three weeks.”
Microsoft Corp., still smarting from its Yahoo rebuff, is now squaring off against Google Inc. over the search giant’s “Google Sky” application, with the launch of “WorldWide Telescope,” extending its battle for Internet dominance with Google to the cosmos.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Friday that WorldWide Telescope is a program for discovering images of the night sky will arrive by the end of May, and is available for free to anyone who wants to use it.
Worldwide Telescope is tool that helps people to watch the celestial body through the data collected by telescopes all around the world — and above it: the software uses the best images from the Hubble Space Telescope and approximately ten earth bound telescopes and allows users to view outer space.
In particular, it will also enable viewing Earth similar to NASA World Wind, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth; although it will not be powered by Virtual Earth and it will only share the image database with it.
Bill Gates, who has been traveling through Asia and dropping interesting comments for several days now, confirmed the release while in Indonesia. “This is taking data that is very complex, gathered over many years from many telescopes, and making it accessible,” said Gates, according to PC World.
WorldWide Telescope is “a wealthy visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope,” says the project’s Web site.
The star-gazing software appears to be similar to Google Sky, which Google launched in August 2007. The official depiction only discloses, “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.”
People utilizing Microsoft’s software can also create their own tours of certain parts of the universe, say a galaxy or star, or listen to professors or others who have posted their own tour. For example, an enthusiast could view the planet Jupiter or Crab Nebula using the software. Worldwide Telescope makes use of star databases all over the Web.
Microsoft could not immediately provide further details about Worldwide Telescope besides that it also includes interactive links to audio and video presentations that offer more information about the part of space that the user is viewing.
The WorldWide Telescope is similar to Google Sky and, to some extent, Celestia. Google Sky blends in high resolution imagery and informative overlays in order to create a unique playground for visualizing and learning about space. The images used to recreate the sky are offered the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Digital Sky Survey Consortium (DSSC), CalTech’s Palomar Observatory, the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC), and the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO).
Gates stated that the data aggregation techniques in Worldwide Telescope could be applied to many other subjects, including genomics, but he did not say whether Microsoft was at work on any other projects.
The service is free, and is dedicated to the memory of Microsoft researcher Jim Gray, who went missing at sea last year. Gray has worked on the SkyServer project which served as a foundation for the Worldwide Telescope.