UrtheCast set to bring you HD video version of Google Earth

If you remember getting hyped-up about Google Earth Street View, you’re going to start jumping up and down on your bed when you read this. Calgary, a Canada-based firm has come with an absolute ambitious and revolutionary way to get “live” feed of whatever’s happening on earth from an astronaut’s perspective!

ISS Camera

The project called UrtheCast (pronounced earth cast or u r the cast, depending on what generation you’re from) plans on streaming video of the earth with HD cameras installed on the International Space Station. Every time the ISS passes over your nick of the woods, you would technically be able to see a video of what's happening there.

The company has collaborated with the Russian Space Agency, RSC Energia, to install two cameras- one medium res and one high res (built by UK-based Rutherford Appleton Laboratories), outside the Russian module of the ISS. The cameras are said to possess the capacity to give a 40 km wide HD color video that can be zoomed down to as close as 1.1 meters from the earth’s surface!

The images gathered by the cameras would first be compressed and sent to reception stations across the world before being beamed to the company’s operations center where the data stream would be uncompressed and bumped back to servers around the globe and finally uploaded to the UrtheCast website where it would be accessible to viewers.

This would be with a functionality close to Google Earth and YouTube! In other words, you would be able to zoom in and out like you can do with Google Earth. You can and also do rewind, fast forward and the other things that you can do with a video stream.

The company hopes that the project will revolutionize the media and education sectors when it launches in mid-2012 with the feeds being able to capture events like the Tahrir Square uprising, places of interests and even weather phenomenon (think hurricane Katrina and the recent Japanese tsunami) as they unfold providing unlimited possibilities for both humanitarian as well as journalistic interests.

Via: CalgaryHerald/Dvice