Posted 06.15.2011 at 4:45 pm
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Geo-Cosmos
If you want to see what Earth looks like from space, become an astronaut (or, barring that, a space tourist). For the next best view, pay a visit to Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation where a massive, nearly 20-foot spherical OLED orb--the world’s first large scale spherical OLED--offers a satellite’s-eye view of the planet in super high resolution.
“Geo-Cosmos” is made up of 10,362 OLED panels that display continuously-updating satellite footage of our tiny blue marble, representing what our planet looks like from space in something close to realtime. It replaces an earlier model covered in LED panels, offering museum-goers a full 10 million pixels, a resolution 10 times greater than its predecessor.
And like any good museum exhibit, Geo-Cosmos is interactive. Touchscreens surrounding the globe allow viewers to tap all kinds of earth science data streaming in from all over the world, like simulations showing the origin of the March 11 earthquake that devastated Japan and the dispersion of all of that energy via tsunamis that reached all the way around the Pacific. See it for yourself below.
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(Sings) "I've got the world on a string...."
Very cool! Couldn't they use some kind of reflective strips or something to put in the gaps between the panels? Wouldn't that make the whole thing look seamless?
That would make for an awesome game of risk.
beautiful invention. i want to see one comprising of the entire solar system. each planet, moon, asteroid belt etc. this would of course take an entire football field to fit.
Looks like the globe from the Venus project....cool!!
@JediMindset just about every text book or magazine picture or model you have seen of the solar system is GROSSLY exaggerated. They could simply make a LED model like you propose and have inaccurate scale like most other models of the solar system. it would still be COOL AS ####
That's one giant disco ball
jPod! Douglas Copland invented this!!!
@JediMindset, if the earth was only the size of a peppercorn, pluto would be about a half mile away (three football fields!) I think the OLED effects at that size would be a little unimpressive.
@inaka_rob
yeah i think down scaling it would work and look best.
@suddenmischief
like i said down scaling from the actual size and putting them in the sky would look awesome!! imagine seeing it in a cloudless night sky? you would be amazed.
i think the sun would look awesome in this format. than we should try other solar systems. how bout alpha centauri? i think a twin star system would be bomb.
This is somewhat like NOAA's Science on a Sphere.