WorldWide Telescope - It's all about the experience

Robert Scoble has a really good post up about the WorldWide Telescope, a project just announced out of Microsoft Research. Why am I blogging about a Microsoft Research Project? Because it sounds like an awesome experience. And frankly, when we think of experience, all the things that are important are drawn out in Robert's post: seeing the world in a new way (dragging and dropping), context, manipulating your environment. It's all there with this application. It's kind of a killer app for the sky as far as I can tell and it's the perfect example of how taking quality data and putting a new experience around it can result in some very, very powerful emotions.

It sounds like they've built a really cool application. I'm a space nut, so maybe I'm biased. But this sounds like Google Maps (one of the premiere, "Ahha!" RIAs) on steroids. At the end of the day, isn't this what creating great applications is about? Building an experience so powerful around useful data that it make people stop and think about everything from their kids to their place in the world? It may be corny, but I say yes. Go out and build an application that changes the way people think about the world.