NASA and Microsoft Let You Explore Mars Like Never Before

By: Stan Schroeder
From: http://mashable.com/

Microsoft Research and NASA have teamed up once again and brought the “most complete, highest-resolution coverage of Mars available” to WorldWide Telescope. Microsoft’s app lets you explore space either through a zoom-and-pan interface or guided tours.

This imagery is the handiwork of a group informally called the Mapmakers, led by NASA’s Michael Broxton. Their job is to take satellite images from Mars and elsewhere in our solar system, and turn them into maps.

Yes, it sounds like every geek’s dream job, and having a name that sounds like something from a William Gibson novel doesn’t hurt, either. Director of Microsoft Research’s Earth Dan Fay has worked with Broxton to turn these images and maps into an immersive new experience for the Worldwide Telescope.

“NASA had the images and they were open to new ways to share them. Through the WorldWide Telescope we were able to build a user interface at WWT|Mars that would allow people to take advantage of the great content they had,” Fay says.

As far as what kind of imagery you can expect here, one example is a new dataset from the University of Arizona’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which is a remote-sensing camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images are taken in an incredibly high resolution — each image is a gigapixel in size — and the team took all 13,000 HiRISE images and stitched them onto one map. This map, says NASA, is the “highest-resolution map of Mars’s surface ever constructed.”

WorldWide Telescope is available as a desktop application or a web client (which requires Microsoft Silverlight) over at www.worldwidetelescope.org.

Facebook for Silverlight Puts a Dark, Stylish Facebook on Your Desktop

Windows/Mac: Back in November, Microsoft featured an attractive Facebook client to demo Silverlight 4, and many people wondered where it went. Well, Microsoft has finally released the fancy Facebook client for download, and it has almost everything you could want from Facebook.

Above all, this app is beautiful, certainly more beautiful than Fishbowl, the client that was released after Silverlight's introduction and confused many by its lack of similarity to the client demoed. Not only does it have cool photo grids integrated into your news feed, but there are some really cool (but subtle) sweeping animations when viewing photos in an album. It even features a photo uploading tool to replace Facebook's mediocre uploader.

Viewing photos is certainly where Silverlight's strengths come into play the most, but the app has pretty much every other part of Facebook integrated—you can view your news feed, friend list feeds, profiles, and even your inbox. You can view a list of upcoming events, but the event pages themselves are not integrated—clicking on it will take you to the event's Facebook page in your browser. The app doesn't currently support chat, which isn't really a drawback due to Facebook chat's suckage—but if you are that addicted to Facebook chat, you can already get it on your desktop easily through a client like Pidgin or Adium.

The app has a few minor bugs, which is to be expected due to the fact that it's still a developer preview. It's supposed to have TweetDeck-style notifications, which I'm not seeing, and sometimes new posts just don't load. A new post on my wall showed up in my news feed but took awhile before it showed up on my wall, so it seems there's a bit of a delay in updates. In addition, it seems you can't use your scroll wheel in the application—you actually have to click the arrows or the scroll bar to scroll up and down. These things are hardly a deterrent, though—if you, like many, have been looking for a desktop version of Facebook since 2005, this looks like the app to use.

The Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook is a free download, requires Windows or Mac OS X with Microsoft Silverlight to use.

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook [via Download Squad]

Send an email to Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com.

World's first 3D office photocopier launches

Photosimile: the world’s first “office photography machine”

By Alan Brandon

From: http://www.gizmag.com/

The Ortery Photosimile 5000 desktop photography studio

Image Gallery (6 images)

Imagine if you could take professional-looking photos and create 3D product animations as easily as using the office copier. Ortery’s Photosimile 5000 system aims to bring that capability to the office by enabling even non-photographers to create high-quality images just by pressing a few buttons. The Photosimile 5000 is a PC-controlled desktop photography studio that integrates a light box, a DSLR camera, automated camera positioning, and specialized workflow software to simplify and automate business photography.

High-quality images are a powerful part of a company’s web presence and marketing collateral. Ortery's desktop studios are designed to make it easy to create professional-looking product photos for use on web sites, in print, and in email for daily business communications. Crisp, well lit images are essential for ecommerce websites, and the Photosimile 5000 adds the ability to produce 3D, 360-degree product animations as well.

The camera and light box connect to a PC using USB. The Photosimile 5000 software controls the studio, camera location, turntable movement, camera settings, picture taking, and post processing. Simply place an item inside the light box then compose your image using the preview, zoom, and crop commands in the software. With one click, the picture automatically downloads to the PC.

Often the difference between professional photography and amateur work is the lighting. The Photosimile 5000 starts by providing consistent, even lighting for shadow-free images and accurate color. The system uses four daylight bulbs providing 6500K illumination. The Photosimile 5000 also includes a Canon DSLR mounted on a mechanical track. You control the position, tilt, and zoom from the PC. The subject of your photo sits on an Ortery turntable, which the company also offers separately. For 360-degree imaging, the camera position is controlled automatically. The Photosimile can accommodate objects up to roughly 22in. (56cm) on each side. For 3D images the maximum size is somewhat smaller.

The Photosimile 5000 synchronizes the position of the turntable and camera to photograph objects from multiple angles in one or more planes. The combination of the turntable and the mechanical track allow the Photosimile 5000 to shoot up to 72 pictures per 360-degree rotation, at nine unique angles from 0 to 90 degrees. The resulting images can be automatically stitched together to create 360-degree product animations. These 3D views can be saved as GIF or Flash files, or exported to Ortery’s Real3D format. Real3D allows you to compose 3D Silverlight animations with mouse control and zoom capabilities. Ortery says the software can combine images to create 360-degree spherical or hemispherical or animations.

The Photosimile 5000 software controls every aspect of the studio including the camera settings, the camera positioning, turntable movement, picture taking, and image post-processing. The software displays a real-time live preview while you compose your picture with the preview, zoom, and crop controls. The software also provides a complete workflow for annotating, masking, and batch processing files including naming, resizing, watermarking, and saving.

Although the system was unveiled in 2008, Ortery recently announced that the Photosimile 5000 is now shipping. Ortery doesn't list pricing, but at least one dealer on the Internet lists the Photosimile at around US$17000.

For more information and some cool 3D samples, visit Ortery technologies at ortery.com.

Playboy Posts Unedited Back Issues Online, for Free

By Mark Hachman

Sex sells, especially when it's free.

Through a partnership between Microsoft and Bondi Digital Publishing, Playboy Enterprises has put 53 back issues of Playboy on the Web, viewable through Microsoft's Silverlight viewer.

The images are free to access at PlayboyArchive.com, with no age verification required.

The issues cover the years 1954 through 2007, and appear as they did in the print version, with advertisements left intact. To do so, Bondi Digital Publishing - the software pioneers that developed the platform for The Complete New Yorker - scanned and re-typed each issue of Playboy, the company said in a statement.

"Playboy has an incredibly rich history and an intensely loyal readership," said Hugh M. Hefner, Playboy founder, editor-in-chief and chief creative officer, in a statement. "This is the perfect opportunity to offer them something they have always wanted and also a great way to allow a whole new generation to easily explore the magazine."

Users will need to install Microsoft's Silverlight player, naturally. The Web component was developed with Microsoft's Partner of the Year, Vertigo.

The player does not allow full-screen viewing, but users can pan around the digital image, which loads large enough so that text can be easily read. When the archive first loads, an array of Playboy covers can be viewed and clicked upon; after that, several pages from the inside of the magazine appear. A table of contents is also available, and the archive is searchable.

The site went live late Thursday, and was announced at Microsoft's Mix09 show in Las Vegas.

Copyright (c) 2009Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.