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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 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 Telescope – the 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.