Photo software reveals new way of looking at the space shuttle

I’ve men­tioned Pho­to­Synth before (from Microsoft Live Labs), but with the cur­rent space shuttle mis­sion, this new gal­lery deserved a mention.

In col­lab­or­a­tion between Microsoft’s Live Labs team in Seattle, Wash­ing­ton, NASA’s Kennedy Space Cen­ter, in Cape Canaveral, Flor­ida, and NASA’s Ames Research Cen­ter, in Sil­icon Val­ley, these col­lec­tions were cre­ated to allow people to see the shuttle Endeav­our, and the Vehicle Assembly Build­ing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Cen­ter in a way never seen before.

 

Basic­ally, you have hun­dreds of images geo-spatially loc­ated around the shuttle as it sits on it’s pad.

 What Pho­to­Synth does is fig­ure out where these shots over­lap, and present you with an incred­ibly cool inter­face to nav­ig­ate within the space, visually.

 Another neat fea­ture is the amount of detail present in the images. You can zoom, and zoom, and zoom, and on some very high rez images, you can reveal aston­ish­ing features.

 And you don’t take a huge band­width hit either. I’ve very impressed by this, and am won­der­ing where this tech­no­logy will resur­face in Microsoft’s world.

Post Script: This art­icle was inspired by my good friend, Ranger-Bob and his awesome/leet tech­nical abil­ity. He is able to watch NASA TV, Live, on his Palm T|X, from his outhouse..now that’s dedication!