building a dobson telescope
body, but with a computer in it, displaying Nasa WorldWind or
Celestia. You look into the telescope and see the earth from space,
move the telescope to move the globe, then call in different feeds to
overlay information . political, pop stats. etc. the stuff
Buckminster Fuller went on about looking at as a global system, if we
are to survive.

[[Tom’s feedback:

I like this idea, but there is a problem with it for me spatially. You’re talking about looking from the outside of the globe inward, so a telescope seems to be the wrong metaphor (I don’t know what a dobson telescope is, so tell me if I’m being an idiot here). Really, you want something more globe-like, don’t you? Or better yet, a way to move the telescope around a central point? I think the standard way you use a telescope would confuse people spatially, and have them concentrating on the use of the telescope, not on what they’re viewing.

On the other hand, the Squidlabs demonstrated something that might be up your alley last weekend. It’s basically a tablet computer with an accelerometer and magnetometer on board, so it senses its orientation relative to the earth. It overlays the city you’d be looking at if you looked through the earth. Point it upward, and it points to the star that’s in your field of view. They developed it as a demo of an augmented reality screen, but it occurs to me that it’s a great inteface for what you’re thinking of.

Another model might be a pair of binoculars that can “see” around the planet and through the planet. In both of these models, the direction the person looks is related to the planet they’re standing on. I think that’s important to your plan…]]