WorldWide Telescope lights up with Kinect

A few weeks ago Microsoft Research held an event on Microsoft Campus called TechFest. We show a lot of new projects and prototypes from our labs (see earlier coverage) but we keep a lot of stuff behind closed doors. There was one demo that blew me away that I couldn’t talk about but now I can as it’s on show at MIX11 and just got demo’ed in the Day 2 keynote and is shown above.

Many of you have seen what the enthusiast community has been doing with Kinect – there is an equally passionate community inside Microsoft who are doing things with Kinect. Some of you may be familiar with WorldWide Telescopethe project that brought Scoble to tears. Well those guys have hooked up Kinect to their system and the results, in my opinion, are spectacular. I got to play with these at TechFest and I was stunned…but promised to stay silent. Now you can see it for yourself in the video above.

WorldWide Telescope is impressive technology on its own – when you add Kinect to the mix, it’s addictive. You can ride through the galaxy with the wave of a hand – zoom in to a planet, leap across star systems. It’s beautiful.

I was going to combine this with a post covering other Day 2 keynote news from MIX but it felt worthy of  a post on its own. I’ll have another post in a few weeks following a long chat I had last week with one of the brain behind WWT – Curtis Wong. He has so much more to show us.

For now, it’s time to cry again, Robert.