Vancouver, BC March 17^th – 21^st

Last week the Microsoft Research WorldWide Telescope and the MIT EyeWire team were invited to present a Virtual Reality in Space experience exhibit – the demo that went from neurons to space in a vivid, 360 degree experience from the International Space Station to ocular neurons.  The immersive experience utilized our 16 Megapixel Wall display and two Oculus Rift goggles all powered by WWT.  Without the goggles, you can experience a video of the tour.

In addition to the VR demo, on Thursday (3/20/14) NASA unveiled a new 360 deg mosaic of the Milky Way – the 20-gigapixel GLIMPSE360 mosaic and it was showcased on our TED2014 display wall, as well as online via browsers with our embedded WWT HTML5 control.   The official press release from NASA and Spitzer called out the Microsoft WWT integration and the ability for web viewers to have instant access to the GLIMPSE360 imagery – check it out for yourself – the imagery is beautiful. 

One of the more interesting interactions of the TED experience was having Cmdr Chris Hadfield be engaged by the ISS visualization on the display wall – especially since he spent much time on the ISS and knows it as well as anyone. 

More articles on the experience:

NEXT Blog on Exhibit by David Chen

NASA's Spitzer Telescope Brings 360-Degree View of Galaxy to Our Fingertips – NASA press release

Tour the Milky Way in 20 billion pixels – CNET

Wisconsin scientists create dramatic 360-degree portrait of Milky Way – Journal Sentinel

New online Windows Azure training for researchers

The global Windows Azure for Research program has been going strong for almost six months, and we’ve been delighted by the response from the researchers around the world who have eagerly attended our in-person training events. Today, we are pleased to announce an online version of the training.

New online Windows Azure training for researchers - Microsoft Research Connections Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Building cloud virtual machines for research

As regular readers of this blog know, the Windows Azure for Research program recurrently solicits proposals on the use of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, in scholarly research. Winning projects receive a one-year allocation of Windows Azure storage and compute resources.

We review these proposals on the fifteenth of even-numbered months (February, April, June, and so forth), so the next deadline, February 15, is fast approaching. This marks our third round of solicitations, and the response so far has been outstanding, as a review of current grantees and their projects attests.

In addition to these standing, bi-monthly requests for proposals, we are initiating a new set of calls, focused on specific cloud-based research topics. Submissions for the first of these special calls are due on March 15, 2014.

Our first special call—Science VMs for Research—requests proposals to build virtual machine (VM) images that can be shared with communities of users. While it is standard practice for scientific communities to share important open-source, domain-specific software tools, using these tools often involves complex installation procedures or the resolution of library conflicts. Cloud computing obviates such impediments by enabling communities to share a complete operating system image, pre-installed with all the tools needed by specialized groups of users. Thus, a newcomer to the group can install the image in the cloud and be doing productive work very quickly. Moreover, the community can keep the cloud-based VM image updated with the latest version of the software.

Building cloud virtual machines for research - Microsoft Research Connections Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Announcing E-book version of Scott Guthrie’s “Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure”

We have published online and downloadable e-book versions of Scott Guthrie’s presentation titled Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure (original video version is available here: part 1, part 2).

Along with the e-book we published the code for the Fix It application that Scott developed to demonstrate many of the recommended cloud development patterns. Before publishing the code, we worked with Microsoft Patterns and Practices to do a thorough code review and testing. In an Appendix to the e-book, we document what we learned from that process, listing issues we fixed and issues we deferred to a later release.

If you’re curious about developing for the cloud, considering a move to the cloud, or are new to cloud development, you’ll find in this e-book a concise overview of the most important concepts and practices you need to know. The concepts are illustrated with concrete examples, and each chapter links to other resources for more in-depth information.   

Announcing E-book version of Scott Guthrie’s “Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure” - .NET Web Development and Tools Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

• Twenty four design patterns that are useful in cloud-hosted applications. Each pattern is provided in a common format that describes the context and problem, the solution, issues and considerations for applying the pattern, and an example based on Windows Azure. Each pattern also includes links to other related patterns.
• Two primers and eight guidance topics that provide basic knowledge and describe good practice techniques for developing cloud-hosted applications. The format of each primer and guidance topic is designed to present this information in a relevant and informative way.
• Ten sample applications that demonstrate the usage of the design patterns described in this guide. You can use and adapt the source code to suit your own specific requirements.

Cloud Design Patterns

This guide from the Microsoft patterns & practices group, produced with the help of many people within the developer community, provides solutions for common problems encountered when developing cloud-hosted applications.

    The guide:

• Articulates the benefit of applying patterns when implementing cloud applications, especially when they will be hosted in Windows Azure.
• Discusses the problems that the patterns address, and how these relate to Windows Azure applications.
• Shows how to implement the patterns using the features of Windows Azure, emphasizing benefits and considerations.
• Depicts the big picture by showing how these patterns fit into cloud application architectures, and how they relate to other patterns.
• 

Cloud Design Patterns

On the Slave Machine:  (One you want to control)
- Create a “wwtconfig” directory in c:\ – ie. c:\wwtconfig
- Ensure the directory isn’t read only
- Create a config.xml file in the c:\wwtconfig directory with the following XML

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <DeviceConfig>
     <Config>
        <Device MonitorCountX="1" MonitorCountY="1" 
                MonitorX="0" MonitorY="0" 
                Master="False" 
                Width="1600" Height="1200" 
                Bezel="1.0" 
                ConfigFile="" BlendFile="" DistortionGrid="" /> 
     </Config>
  </DeviceConfig>

On the Master Machine
- Start Worldwide Telescope
- Set it into “Master” mode – click on Settings > Advanced menu and select Master Controller

Then they should be paired up.  The Slave machine will be in full screen mode – to get out of it, hit esc, and then close out the WWT window.  I usually then rename the config file to be able to start WWT up and run it normally. 

The first three blog posts of the series are out – take a look and test it out:

• Creating a Linux VM on Windows Azure (1/4)
• Installing IPython notebook (2/4)
• Scipy and Scikit-Learn (3/4)

The two main anchors of the exhibit was the physical model of the JWST and the WorldWide Telescope Theater.  Over the 3 days the WWT Theater hosted over 70 talks using WWT Tours, PowerPoint, and live Skype QnAs – all on a 20 million pixel wall sized display wall.  

Behind the scenes – this immersive experience was pulled together by Microsoft Research and our partners for the theater – Epson, NVIDA and Scalable Display Technologies.  The 8 Epson projectors worked flawlessly pumping out pixels for over 14 hours a day and this was in a tent without air conditioning and lots of humidity – especially during the first two days of rain.  The 8 projectors were driven by 2 NVIDIA Quadro K5000’s in a single PC.   The display wall needed the DirectX 11 support to show off the latest WWT Eclipse Alpha build that leverages DX11.  Delivering all those pixels to the display wall was one piece, but to make the images seamless and immersive the Scalable Display Manager (SDM) was used.  The (SDM) software with it’s EasyBlend technology, made it a snap to wrap and blend the pixels coming from the individual projectors into a really seamless experience. 

This whole setup allowed the team to utilize the wall as a very, very large Windows desktop and take advantage of all the Windows applications for the presentations – including

• PowerPoint 2013, which takes advantage of DirectX and hardware acceleration and was able to handle the unique aspect ratio so the whole display was used for content
• Skype – probably the largest Skype image for Skype session on a desktop you’ve ever seen
• OneNote 2013 – used for displaying notes and twitter names for a NASA Social at SXSW
• SkyDrive – was used to deliver PowerPoint presentations and WorldWide Telescope Tours to machine driving the display wall and kept them in sync – so edits were always captured
• WorldWide Telescope – used to deliver tours exclusive created for the JWST SXSW exhibit. 

While most of you might not need to create a wall sized display like this one – it shows how desktop technologies created for Windows scales to create immersive experiences.  Let me know if you decide to create one….

Seeing Your World Through a Different Light

As the saying goes: everything is bigger in Texas. And coming this weekend, March 8 to 10, there will be a couple of Texas-sized telescopes at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin. Housed in the mammoth NASA Experience Tent, a wall-sized display will show off Microsoft Research’s WorldWide Telescope (WWT), demonstrating the amazing capabilities of the world’s largest virtual telescope. Outside, on the lawn of the Long Center, there will be a full-scale model of the next generation of the Hubble Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—a truly impressive piece of engineering that’s the size of a tennis court.

Microsoft Research is partnering with NASA, Northrop Grumman, and the Space Telescope Science Institute to offer a truly interactive exhibit, with University of Austin astronomy students on hand to show off details of the JWST model on Microsoft Surface devices. Meanwhile, WWT will provide festival goers with an immersive virtual experience as they fly through the universe and explore the planets and stars. As you may know, the WWT brings together imagery from the world’s best ground and space-based telescopes and combines it with 3-D navigation. It also includes guided tours of interesting places in the sky, created and narrated by astronomers and educators.

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