It brought Scoble to tears, now WorldWide Telescope is here

The technology that brought Scoble to tears is now available for everyone to play with

The WorldWide Telescope is a rich, Web 2.0 visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless, rich media-guided exploration of the universe. It is also a platform providing a base for teaching astronomy, scientific discovery, and computational science. Rich media tours with narration, music, text and graphics create compelling, interactive learning experiences that allow people to search, explore and discover the universe in a truly new and unique manner. 

In a nutshell it’s an amazing S+S application that allow you to be a space tourist from your desktop. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and it’s stunning. There are some very cool built in tours for the non astronomers in the audience. I tried to explain it to a friend and fell in to the obvious comparison – it’s like Google Earth Virtual Earth for space.

Go Play and remind yourself that yes, this old dinosaur Microsoft really does do innovation. I’m sure Jim Gray would love it.