Hi Beautiful! – Tanagram proudly announces SkyBeautiful.com

If you were following us on twitter last week you already know this but SkyBeautiful was christened and launched last Wednesday. It was well received by Microsoft and the horde-o-press folks Microsoft had gathered to announce “The Beauty of The Web” and the new Internet Explorer 9.

So what’s all the hub-bub about? I mean, “haven’t we been able to do this in Flash for years?” Well, not exactly. SkyBeautiful is very special in a number of ways. First, it represents data collected from numerous sources including NASA, Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope, and the European Space Agency (ESA) in a way never before experienced.

From the SkyBeautiful About page:

Using the fantastic Hipparcos “New Reduction” data provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) we have created a three-dimensional model of approximately 120,000 of the stars nearest to our sun. That’s right, we are rendering tens-of-thousands of “star-points” on your screen, in real-time (not right now!), every time you pan the sky with your greasy mouse-fingers. It’s a minor miracle given to you by Microsoft and their compiler-builder rocket-scientists. In the split second before you think about thinking, Internet Explorer 9 converts our ga-jillions of lines of JavaScript and HTML code into a binary application that runs on the very very veeeh-hairy fastest parts of your computer. Neat huh? Thanks Bill!

We’ve also incorporated (because it’s a 3D model) an Anaglyphic View (including directions to make or buy glasses) of our star model. If you click the glasses on the bottom of the screen, you will be taken to a version of the site that is rendering twice the number of stars (one for each eye!) in a spatial-ized view. I should note, that while the star relationships are proportionally correct, we cheated and reduced light-years to pixels. We also are not rendering any star with a magnitude greater than 9 because your monitor likely can’t handle it and you won’t miss them.

We were taken by surprise when Toshiba and Sony demo-ed SkyBeautiful on their latest touch-enabled computers and were very pleased at how well it behaved in “touch-mode.” While we design all of our current projects to meet “touch transitional” specifications, it was a real pleasure to see our Natural User Interface work in action.

The real difference between SkyBeautiful and any other Flash or Silverlight site is that it is naked. If you want to learn how we did something, right-click and save-as and the code (including our JSON) is yours to explore. Like I posted earlier, Microsoft created IE9 to send a message to us that they are no longer trying to dominate the internet but instead are recognizing that they are part of a bigger system. SkyBeautiful, represents that same belief in many ways. The first is, and most obvious, is the representation of mankind within our understanding of the universe. The second is that it is entirely open-source. We “hand-rolled” our own 3D engine that renders in the Canvas Element (2D) and if you want to do something similar, you can copy our code and modify it under the Ms-PL Open Source license. You can also download our data, a collection of over 93,000 stars with distance measurements (see disclaimer on accuracy!) and build your own modeling system. The Open Source movement, and IE9 both acknowledge participation in larger systems and we approve. It’s amazing to see what we did with publicly available data, and we are super excited to see what others do with our work. Below you’ll find a video demonstrating the 3D model using the same technology we use for our Augmented Reality research. I’ve also attached several other screen shots for easy perusing.

Please let us know what you think. Enjoy the site, and know as soon as there is a ratified 3D standard, that SkyBeautiful will evolve so you can see our constellations from, say, Vega. We also hope to give you the ability to create your own constellations and share them with friends. Be warned, you’ll need to write a “legend” to go with it and we’ll likely be blocking “huge penises in the sky.” This is after-all a family friendly location.