Folks.

The following appeared on an IVOA list, describing Microsoft's plans  
for their WWT service.  I thought it might be of interest to folk here.

Norman


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Jonathan Fay <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2008 January 17 17:28:46 GMT
> To: Pierre Fernique <[log in to unmask]>,  
> "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: WWT & VO (was NG of GS & BO standards for JPEG with WCS)
> Reply-To: Jonathan Fay <[log in to unmask]>
>
> As far as WWT we are planning to document all our data access  
> interfaces, and open them up some time after we go live pending  
> legal review.
> We have a cutout service, a high-speed tile service, and a  
> reprojection/compositing service that are currently used internal  
> to WWT that may be opened up as the interfaces stabilize and we  
> confirm the legal status on the data to be served.
>
> The reason they exist, rather than hit the VO sources directly is  
> they are highly tuned for large scale visualization across the sky.  
> No current VO service is designed to service that need, so it was  
> necessary for us to implement that service, as well as a new  
> projection to allow full 3d sky access efficiently without  
> singularities. The full sky tile sets are meant to be reprojected  
> with 3d hardware, a software reprojection is necessary for  
> integration of them into 2d imaging applications, thus our cutout  
> and reprojection service.
>
> It may take a while for external access to get rolling on this  
> given the new projections, but the cutout server one it is released  
> should be useful for applications fairly quickly as in gives a TAN  
> projection back as JPEG or PNG image, and won't require  
> reprojection for display.
>
> Most of this data is sourced from VO sites thru the VO interfaces,  
> but we reproject and tile as necessary to make it scale well. For  
> instance Hubble publishes press release images thru a SIA query and  
> VO Table. Some of which are 16k x 16k and over half a gigabyte.  
> These images are beautiful, but too large for public download. They  
> must be turned into tiled multi-res pyramids to be served on mass  
> scale efficiently. Other VO services had full sky data, but the  
> data must be projected into a tiles multi-res mosaic for  
> visualization. That operation is not real-time friendly, but once  
> that work has been done the result is a useful service that should  
> (and will be) made available to others to use.
>
> Related to your other question is that WWT will also natively open  
> AVM encoded images (currently a IVOA note) and display them  
> directly in the sky. The last details of V1.1 of the proposed  
> standard were hashed out at a meeting at AAS last week. Spitzer,  
> Chandra and Hubble images are all going to be encoded with AVM, and  
> many already are.
>
> WWT Pro, that we are co-developing with Harvard IIC/CFA will be a  
> very rich VO client for interacting with VO images,  catalogs,  
> footprints, events, etc. While it is entirely possible to have all  
> this functionality in the wide release version of WWT, we don't  
> want to overload the existing VO infrastructure.
>
> Jonathan Fay
> Principal Research Software Design Engineer
> WorldWide Telescope
> Microsoft Research
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On  
> Behalf Of Pierre Fernique
> Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 12:17 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: next generation of Sky in Google Earth
>
>
> Dear VO members,
>
> I would like to bring the discussion to another point related to  
> the VO
> and Google Sky/WWT.
>
> I would like to ask to Google sky team and Microsoft WWT team if it is
> possible to create my own client accessing their image data base. For
> instance, if I want to add a dedicated Aladin layer displaying the HTM
> sky background images from Microsoft data base, or the sector base sky
> background images from Google, could I ? 1) Is there open standards  
> for
> that and I can develop my own client ? 2) Could I have to plug a  
> kind of
> proprietary libraries in Aladin ? 3) Or perhaps it is not possible at
> all (technically ? strategically ? no documented ?) Obviously, the  
> first
> solution will be the best for my VO point of view.
>
> I really appreciate to offer to Aladin users these astronomical data.
> Exactly in a symetric way that WWT and Google Sky use Simbad opened
> standards (object resolver, ...), or VizieR catalog access, and  
> other VO
> access..
>
> Pierre Fernique
>

-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester