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Video: An astronaut’s view of Earth in real time

By | June 17, 2011, 4:30 AM PDT

A new, gigantic Japanese globe unveiled in Tokyo features 10,362 OLED panels that show constantly updated satellite images of Earth.

The nearly 20-foot-in-diameter globe, called Geo-Cosmos, displays Earth’s current appearance in more than 10 million pixels, an incredibly high resolution that is ten times sharper than the previous model, built with LED panels.

The interactive exhibit at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation also features interactive touchscreens that allow visitors to browse earth science images and data from all over the world. For instance, the touchscreens feature simulations of the March 11th earthquake that triggered the massive tsunami in northeast Japan.

Watch museum-goers marveling at the globe and playing with the interactive displays:

Photo: screenshot

via: Popular Science

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Laura Shin

About Laura Shin

Laura Shin is a contributing editor for SmartPlanet.

Laura Shin

Laura Shin

Contributing Editor

Laura Shin has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Audubon and SolveClimate.com. She is currently a senior editor at LearnVest.com. Previously, she worked at Newsweek, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. She holds degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Follow her on Twitter.

Laura Shin

Laura Shin

In the unlikely event that Laura has a professional or financial relationship with a company she writes about, it will be prominently disclosed.

She writes for SmartPlanet and is not an employee of CBS.

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-4 Votes
+ -
Who paid for this?
A novel technical exercise but are there better ways to spend that money?
Posted by rickl1@...
17th Jun 2011
+5 Votes
+ -
It's a great learning tool to inspire young minds.
It's a great learning tool to inspire young minds. There are many worse ways that people spend their money.
Posted by omb00900@...
17th Jun 2011
+2 Votes
+ -
Interesting
This is an interesting way to see weather patterns across the whole planet without the distortion of flattening the images. I liked seeing the tsunami ripple spread from Japan and go across the Pacific.
Posted by sboverie
17th Jun 2011
0 Votes
+ -
Pixels
Is "10 million pixels" correct? Shouldn't it be 10 megapixels per square cm or something like that?
Posted by dangnad
17th Jun 2011
0 Votes
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My guess would be
because it's not a continuous display, but a collection of 10,362 about 4" x 4" OLED panels. As you can see in the video, they are all placed at different angles with some places having more "dead space" than others.
So, to make it easier, they simply took the amount of pixels in one of those panels and multiplied it by the number of screens.
Posted by Dzmitry Z
17th Jun 2011
-1 Votes
+ -
Soundtrack
Why such lame music for such a stunning exhibit?
Posted by jc8ward
17th Jun 2011
0 Votes
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I don't see how those are real-time images?
A good portion of the earth is constantly in the dark.
According to this "real-life" image apparently nobody ever sleeps!
Posted by Dzmitry Z
17th Jun 2011
0 Votes
+ -
You're right
Hi Dzmitry,

You're right. When I was researching this, the information I found said "near real-time" and I assumed that's how they accounted for the fact that half the earth is in the dark at any given time, but I neglected to mention that in my post. Thanks for pointing that out.

Laura
Posted by laurashin
17th Jun 2011
0 Votes
+ -
That makes more sense
I guess that's why they need all those computers to merge pieces of data in a manner that's presentable. Thank you for your quick reply!
Posted by Dzmitry Z
17th Jun 2011
+1 Vote
+ -
Updated daily
Hi Dzmitry,

I looked into this more, because I was interested in finding out exactly how often they update it. The museum website says, "It is possible to see an image of the Earth as early as the morning of that current day." And another Tokyo publication, which previously reported that the globe was "constantly updated," revised its post to say the globe features images "updated daily." Clearly not as exciting as we thought, but still very recent images. Thanks for asking about this because this is an important point to clear up.

Laura
Posted by laurashin
19th Jun 2011
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