AirSpaceMag.com

I became fascinated by the Xbox 360 Kinect system long before it hit the stores—back when Microsoft was still developing it under the name Project Natal. The commercial product hasn’t yet delivered on the full promise of this demo, but I expect that it will, and fairly soon. Kinect is already the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time.

It’s not just virtual volleyball and dancing, either. Hackers started “improving” and fiddling around with Kinect almost from the beginning. Here’s a cool Kinect interaction with Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope:

Awesome.  I love the little blast of air they get at around the 48-second mark.

More coolness in Google Earth: A virtual helicopter flight over the Chamonix Valley in France, including Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in western Europe. Take the whole tour at this site (you’ll need the Google Earth plug-in, which is easy to install) or watch a short YouTube video below:

Victoria Crater in Google Mars.

Real Mars exploration has been at an impasse lately, what with the Spirit rover stuck in the sand, and the Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft both experiencing  service interruptions.

But virtual Mars exploration is going gangbusters. Google Mars, if you haven’t tried it yet, is a feature in recent versions of Google Earth that makes Martian tourism easy from your home computer. Google recently added more archived images from the European Mars Express orbiter, so that now nearly half the planet’s surface is covered by imagery having a nominal resolution of 25 meters per pixel. It’s well worth checking out. The long-awaited day where you can explore a convincing representation of Mars based on actual high-resolution data is rapidly approaching.

Here’s a quick overview:

Sony Pictures

A shame that Cessna doesn’t seem to recognize a potential PR gold mine. Remember when Mathias Rust landed a rented Cessna 172 near Red Square in 1987? Not a peep from Cessna headquarters. Now the company appears to have missed out again: In the mega-apocalyptic move 2012, a lowly Cessna 340A saves one extended family from a variety of spectacular demises.

The world’s only Antonov An-225 makes a valiant attempt to do the same but ends up sliding off a cliff and exploding (as does just about everything else, everywhere, 24/7, in this movie). Oh, and Kennedy is back in the White House — the aircraft carrier, that is.