In the 1960s, it was Russia vs USA. Now, it's Google vs Microsoft, and while Google may have gazumped Microsoft on global mapping, Microsoft now has all of space in its sights.
In the 1960s two super powers with vastly different philosophies fought a space race to control ‘the high frontier'.
Almost fifty years on, the two super powers of the digital age have engaged in a virtual space race.
Microsoft may dominate the world's desktops but Google has the upper hand on the online battlefield, as well as having stolen the march for mapping our planet with Google Earth -- despite Microsoft originating the concept with its TerraServer project.
Last year Google made one giant leap for geek-kind with the release of Google Moon, which lets you zoom and move around those parts of the lunar surface that have been visited by NASA.
In response, Microsoft has literally set its sights on the stars with a project called Virtual Sky -- a desktop client that taps into data from Microsoft's six year old SkyServer project. SkyServer, in turn, draws upon the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which aims to create a three-dimensional mapping of near space using high-resolution snaps captured by a 120 megapixel camera and a pair of spectrographs. The project team's latest tweak is a mashup which adds images from the Hubble space telescope.
The result is a high-speed spacetrip with almost the same smooth scaling and panning as you'd enjoy using Google Earth or Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Instead of drilling down to city block or street you're zooming in on a galaxy or a star, with more than 80 million of them to choose from.
Even cooler is that SkyServer has been integrated with Virtual Earth so that you can start your journey by lifting off from any point on the globe and zoom out, out, out until our solar system would be as insignificant a speck as any other.
Inside Microsoft's Research Labs
Virtual Sky is among dozens of incubation projects at Microsoft Research, the company's R&D arm which employs 800 uber-geeks in five labs across three continents and boasts an annual budget of US$250 million.
Each year, Microsoft Research showcases its latest works-in-progress at Microsoft's sprawling headquarters in Redmond, Seattle. Dubbed TechFest, this annual event is traditionally a Microsoft-only gathering but has this year been opened to journalists for the first time.
Invariably described as a ‘science fair' or ‘show-and-tell session', TechFest is where the largely undirected and sometimes wacky work of Microsoft Research is shared with developers and product managers from the rest of the company, who can see if there's a fit with any of their forthcoming products and technologies.
If there is, thus begins the slow dance of ‘transfer' as the concepts are refined and ushered into a deliverable product. "We don't just pick up our ideas and throw them over the wall to the product guys" explains Rico Malvar, Director of the Microsoft Research labs in Redmond, "because their usually first reaction is ‘Rico, you come up with all these crazy ideas, go away!'. We work together, we show them some of our ideas and go ‘What about this?' and they say ‘No, I can't do that because my product does this', so we go back to the drawing board. It happens little by little, so that process can take a long time".
But Microsoft knows this transfer stage needs to happen faster if it's to make the most of any advantages stemming from its Microsoft Research think-tanks. "Our mission statement is to expand the state of the art in each of the areas in which we do research, and then rapidly transfer innovative technologies into products" explains Rick Rashid, who has headed Microsoft Research since its inception 15 years ago. "When we have great ideas we work extraordinarily hard to get those ideas into our products".
Some of technologies which have made the leap from labs to day-to-day desktop reailty include ClearType and the desktop sidebar, both of which this writer saw Rashid present as demo concepts during briefings in 1997 before their respective debuts in Windows XP and Windows Vista (although an earlier version of the Sidebar appeared as the Dashboard in Microsoft's MSN 8 client in October 2002).
However, those briefings also included a global mapping program named TerraServer which let users explore the world from above and zoom down to near ground level using a mix of geographic databases and topographic maps.
The product was well ahead of its time in terms of desktop processing power, image availability and Internet bandwidth. Of course, when that time arrived Google was far quicker off the mark and came out of almost nowhere to turn Google Earth into a mainstream product. They were so successful that Google almost ‘owns' the concept in the public eye -- so much so that, ironically, the easiest and most natural way for anyone to describe Microsoft's Virtual Sky is to say that it's "like Google Earth for the stars".
We'll bring you more highlights from TechFest tomorrow, including some amazing tools for podcasting and the Web 2.0 wave.
David Flynn is attending TechFest at Seattle as a guest of Microsoft