Alyssa Goodman edited The Universe Project.md  almost 10 years ago

Commit id: e8e39a4c044abc2dd16a8d64012c3577ba920ed2

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In 2005, Wong attended a Kavli workshop at The University of Chicago called _The Visualization of Astrophysical Data_ and presented his vision for the Universe Project. Wong's slides are still online at the conference site, here: https://kicp-workshops.uchicago.edu/visualization2005/. Also attending the workshop was Alyssa Goodman, a Harvard Astronomy professor with long-standing interests in data visualization and innovation in education. Goodman and Wong became fast friends, and Goodman promised to help with the "Universe" project, if it were ever possible to fund its creation.   In 2006, Wong got the go-ahead to make the Universe Project real, and in so-doing he had the great fortune to collaborate with Jonathan Fay, an extraordinary software architect and amateur astronomer himself. The software was built during 2006-8 with Wong designing the experience; experience and  Fay developing technical architecture and code; code,  with Goodman and other professional astronomers providing input and advice on content and how researchers and the public might use it. The software was renamed WorldWide Telescope in honor of Jim Gray who had been lost at sea. WWT was first previewed at the 2008 TED Conference by Roy Gould, science education expert at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. S&T featured WWT in 2008, in an article by Stuart Goldman, who explained that WWT is so feature-laden that to learn it, one should _"Watch the introductory tours to learn your way around the program — and then left- and right-click on everything!"_ This is still very good advice--and there's much more to find now than there was in 2008!