The WorldWide Telescope made Robert Scoble cry.
I downloaded the application and tried it out. Somehow, the default user interface of the application just seems better than what you get when trying to explore the sky with Google Earth. In the end, maybe among the astronomy buffs and the techies in the know, WorldWide Telescope isn’t much better than Google Earth or maybe even not on par. But, in terms of selling an idea, I think Microsoft has done a better job than Google. Unfortunately, some people can’t get beyond the fact that this product is from Microsoft and judge it on its own merits - see the comments on TechCrunch.
It really is funny. Microsoft has been accused of being this soulless borglike entity. In this case, they have captured the essence of the wonder that looking up into the sky can bring better than Google and they still get shit.
Compare the video below found on Google Earth’s page introducing Google Sky.
Now, go to WorldWide Telescope and watch the videos there.
Sure, the Google video is less polished. That doesn’t make it more authentic which is a marketing buzzword people like to throw around when criticizing videos that seem to be too polished when in actual fact the video’s only crime is that it just doesn’t gel with their own world view.
Anyway, try some of the tours on Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope. It is like having an Omnimax experience on your laptop - an experience that you can interact with and contribute more of.
Finally, this application made me remember some happy times associated with looking up into the sky. One of them was at the end of sec four when I went for a Christmas party at my bestfriend’s church and some of us went to look at the stars. That was the day I learned how to spot Orion’s belt.
The second time was in junior college when a bunch of us went down to the beach to gaze at the meteor shower.
There is something that stirs the human spirit (or at least in this human’s spirit) when looking out into the sea and up into the sky. Microsoft’s application and their website invokes that feeling.
I leave you with a passage from Wikipedia explaining the novel and one passage from the novel by Isaac Asimov ‘The End of Eternity‘.
discovered that Eternity was suppressing the creative individuals in humanity in order to protect the rest. In the end this has the effect of denying humanity’s access to the stars, as alien species advance technologically and confine humanity to Earth. Eventually humanity will die out, millions of years in the future, leaving an empty Earth.
With that disappearance… came the end, the final end of Eternity — And the beginning of Infinity.
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