WorldWide Telescope released May 13, 2008
Posted by astroed in Astronomy, Education, ICT.trackback
Microsoft Research have now released WorldWide Telescope.
I haven’t had a chance to use it yet as the system requirements are beyond my four-year old desktop PC at work and I don’t have Windows running on my Mac either. A pity as it certainly looks engaging and powerful from the visualisations provided on the website.
It appears that the developers have approached it very much as an educational tool. I’m impressed with the simple (Flash) homepage with the three sections: Telling stories, The visual experience, and Context. The download seems pretty hefty and 10 GB of hard disk space is recommended. For Windows PCs they suggest: 3D accelerated card with 128 megabytes (MB) RAM; discrete graphics card with dedicated 256-MB VRAM recommended for higher performance.
Hopefully I’ll get a chance to try it in the next few days. No doubt there will be lots of discussion on various sites. I’m interested in seeing how practicable it is is the average school.
Now, all I need is more time to play with this and Google Sky to get a better feel for them.
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