Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope Shows Great Potential, Haters Say Meh

photo credit: DRB62

This morning I woke up to a Slashdot posting on Microsoft’s latest software project, the WorldWide Telescope (WWT). This is the rumored world-changing project that made Robert Scoble cry, and it’s something I’ve been waiting eagerly for since Scoble’s teasing posts. I’ve loved astronomy since I was a kid, so when I caught word that this uber-secret project had to do with collecting images from telescopes around the world, it quickly moved up to “must have” status.

In this preview from the most recent TED conference, Roy Gould, a notable science educator, and Curtis Wong, an MS Research employee who works on the WWT, demo the software and cover a few of the ways it would be useful. Most notably, it will significantly change the way astronomy is first taught, and makes a wealth of astronomical pictures and data available to the general public.

Comparisons to Google Sky, Stellarium, Celstia, and a wealth of other space programs are unavoidable, but it seems as if Microsoft is trying to do something very different with this software. All of the above programs offer detailed views of the sky in differing ways, but none of them combine seamless access to a wide variety of telescopes around the world in the way WWT does. In many ways, this seems like an evolution from the Photosynth technology shown a few months ago, although we don’t know much about the specifics of the project yet.

Given everything we see in this demo, I think it’s very likely that WorldWide Telescope will significantly shift the way we all relate to the night sky. Instead of being something distant and untouchable, we could all be amateur astronomers. And with the state of science education in America at such a low point, this can only be good news.

What I find surprising about this announcement has little to do with the content of the demo, and more to do with how the public is reacting to it. Take a quick glance at the comments for the Slashdot posting and TED video, and you’ll see people who instantly dismiss the whole WWT endeavor seemingly only because it’s coming from Microsoft. MS-bashing isn’t new on the Internet, but it is disheartening to see many devalue this project due to petty misconceptions and fanboyism.

The WorldWide Telescope has world-changing potential–but I suppose that isn’t enough for the M haters out there. It really makes me think about what, if anything, MS can do to shift their public perception. They’ve been so ruthless over the years, and Google so benevolent, that it just seems like the natural order of things. While this initial preview still has a fair amount of doubters, I suspect that their number will diminish as we learn more about WWT and actually get to play with the technology. If anything can shift the public perception of MS, it’s this.