Microsoft World Wide Telescope image:37752:0::0

Microsoft's World Wide Telescope has been the topic of industry rumor mills and blog posts lately. Until now there has been no actual video demonstration of how the product is going to work.

The World Wide Telescope is a web connected desktop application that provides viewers with a tiled tour of high resolution, zoomable images of the entire night sky made up of several different photos from several different satellites and telescopes.

As stated on the World Wide Telescope the product is:

a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.

On the World Wide Telescope website, the FAQ's answers the question

"What are some of the most compelling features of WWT?"

1. WorldWide Telescope is an observatory on your desktop, allowing you to see the sky in a way you have never seen before; individual exploration, multi-wavelength views, stars and planets within context to each other, zoom in/out, and a capability for anyone to create and share a tour of the universe.

2. The Visual Experience Engine delivers seamless panning zooming around the night sky.

3. WWT delivers seamless integration of science:-relevant information including multi-wavelength, multiple telescope distributed image and data sets, and one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources.

As ReadWriteWeb reports, the telescope remarkable and worth looking at. It will scale huge images of the universe down to something that viewers can watch and navigate via a computer, which would provide a huge innovation.

The telescope is not available yet but will be soon.

View the video at FastCompany.tv
Or visit the official World Wide Telescope website