Mount Everest in IE

Want to experience beautiful awe inducing views of Mount Everest on your PC or Tablet? Now you can, thanks to Microsoft’s partnership with GlacierWorks. The newly launched HTML5 based site allows viewers to see the changes Mount Everest and the greater Himalayan regions have faced over the last 86 years. There is no better day to launch the project than today, the 60th anniversary of the historic first ascent to the summit of Everest.

The site compares images taken by explorer George Mallory in 1921 to recently taken images of the region. The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team, Microsoft Research, and developers at Pixel Lab have worked hard to make the experience a reality. The teams hopes that the images will allow people to finally understand the important impact climate change has on the world.

Breashears, founder of GlacierWorks, commented on the recent partnership and its ability to show the negative impacts of global warming:

“I am very excited to launch this project and give millions of people the opportunity to understand these important changes and also to explore Everest and the Himalayas.”

You can visit the newly launched site with IE to take advantage of special touch features. In addition, other technological highlights include a gigapixel panorama viewer, which uses the HTML-5 based viewer from Bing to render panoramas containing billions of pixels, and Microsoft’s Rich Interactive Narrative (RIN) technology. Built by Microsoft Research, RIN, is a presentation system for building “nonlinear, interactive and cinematic narratives that seamlessly stitch together various media”.

You can join in on the adventure here by trekking through the mountain ranges and discussing the impact global warming and other environmental changes have on our future.

Do you use IE or is Chrome/Firefox your default browser? (Personally, I use Chrome on my ThinkPad and IE10 on my Surface)

Sources: Microsoft Green Blog, The Fire House