Turning the Hayden Planetarium Into a Giant Videogame

pigrabbitbear writes "Remember your first visit to the planetarium? Neil DeGrasse Tyson does — it was what inspired him to become an astrophysicist in the first place. That same planetarium, now under Tyson's direction, is currently undergoing a transformation the likes of which Neil's young self couldn't have possibly imagined: It's becoming a giant videogame."

Comments

You too can do this

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on your local planetarium, most rent out for $500 a night. You'd have to fiddle with the digital projector, and because most games aren't programmed assuming they'll be projected out onto a dome you'll have to deal with massive visual distortion, but you can pull this off too. For those of you that want to play at home, a digital projector and a 5-meter dome will run you about $25k.

Re:You too can do this

[Anonymous Coward]

When you say "you'd have to fiddle with the digital projector", you missed a plural, and oversimplified "fiddling" -- from TFA, it's a 6-projector array, with six computers each driving one projector. Since they said it's a 4500x4500 array, I assume each projector is at 2560x1600 or similar, with a few pixels overlap for 2250x1500 effective. I doubt most people, or even most serioius gamers, have a machine capable of chunking that many pixels around (at acceptable quality settings, on modern games), and even for a video card technically capable, there's a whole mess of complexity regarding DP vs. DL-DVI, etc. that's likely to require some new cables and adapters you don't have.

Still... sounds doable, though not easy; both challenging and fun, not ridiculously expensive... Might have to get the crew together and do it sometime.

Amusingly, some really old games (doom-era, not sure if DooM itself among them) used cylindrical projection, whereas all current games I'm aware of use planar projection -- the cylindrical projection is better, horizontally anyway, for planetarium display. Of course, with the recent affordability of multi-screen systems, it shouldn't be long till games start permitting spherical or multi-planar projections, to deal with monitors placed in an arc rather than a single plane, but I haven't seen any do it yet.

Quake

[tedgyz]

How about quake 1/2/3/4? How cool would it be to have a 360 view?

Re:Quake

[i.r.id10t]

I think Descent 3d would be better... I've played some with the planetarium here at work (dumping visualizations to a file and then playing on it... greatful dead, live recordings from archive.org) and it has some weird input - 30fps, must be 1024x1024, must be mpeg-1. And what we think of as the "middle" of the image (at 512,512) is actually top dead center on the dome... Gonna build a grid map (128x128 pixel chunks) project it and take some pix, get an idea as to where the focal point should really be

I like the old ones

[MichaelSmith]

The planetarium in Melbourne used to have a mechanical projector which rotated in the middle of the room to move the image across the ceiling. It was fantastic to watch and I used to drop in there just to watch the machinery. The new planetarium is just a big electronic projector and the stars aren't pinpoints anymore. They are out of focus spots. And now there is all sorts of stuff projected on to the ceiling, when what you are supposed to be looking at is the sky. They should just give up and build a normal cinema. Its not a planetarium any more.

Re:I like the old ones

[neBelcnU]

While the clockwork versions may still exist in small school planetariums, the digital-mechanical hybrids are all long gone. You can thank Evans and Sutherland for demoing a version back in the early 80's, using a single, b&w tube projector through a Nikon 8mm (fisheye) camera lens. In spite of limitations that you'd all laugh at, it was instantly obvious that this was the future.

MichaelSmith is correct, the digital video projectors have yet to get close to the pinpoint-sharpness of the old electro-mechanical projectors, and those monsters were a delight to watch in motion. But having operated those old beasts (Spitz STS), the limitations far outweigh the benefits.

With the near-perfect rendition of consistent motion across the entire field of view, a modern digital video planetarium can utterly swamp the viewer's visual cortex: "sharpness" just doesn't matter when you can fly through Saturn's rings. I can say that I can't discern the "blurry dots" once the show gets rolling, I'm pretty comfy asserting that the average viewer's just drooling while their brains leak out of their ears. Having endorsed the modern, I'll confess to a desire to sit and watch the last STS (at Eastern Kentucky University) just quietly "roll" the sky, but that's nostalgia talkin'.

As for playing a game on a digital video dome? Innnnnteresting. I'm happy to tell you that as a witness to the history MichaelSmith elevates, get outta my way, I'm goin' to Dr. Tyson's place for game-night.

Re:I like the old ones

[dotsandlines]

My dome has a GOTO Chiron hybrid system + E&S Digistar 3, that communicate together to keep digital constellation figures and other graphics aligned with the mechanical star field. The Chiron has a reasonably small profile and doesn't get in the way like some of the old beasts did. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

I see gestures

[recharged95]

Gesture input that is....

Put a sheet of pepper's ghost horizontally and some cool things can come out of a large space like that.

Re:Neil Tyson

[Megahard]

No, that was Mike Brown.

Disambiguation for Bostonians

[pz]

The Hayden Planetarium mentioned in the article (which is in New York) is different than the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston. They are, however, named for the same benefactor.

Cutting edge

[Quiet_Desperation]

Will it be utilizing the cloud?

'Cause that's important, you know?

Re:Neil Tyson

[K. S. Kyosuke]

No! We must never forget that he was the man who demoted Pluto. I liked Pluto.

The year is A.D. MDXLV...

Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter: Dude, Nicolaus Copernicus was awesome.

Bartolomeo Spina: No! We must never forget that he was the man who demoted the Earth as the center of the Universe. I liked Earth as the center of the Universe!

Hayden Panettiere

[sharkey]

I think that Ms. Panettiere would make an OUTSTANDING controller for the Hayden Planetarium.

Neil Tyson Dwarf Astronomer

[frovingslosh]

Awesome? There is a movement to get Neil DeGrasse Tyson downgraded from Astronomer to Dwarf Astronomer.

Re:Neil Tyson Dwarf Astronomer

[Sockatume]

(1) An "astronomer" is a scientist that: (a) is in an astronomy department, (b) has sufficient publication output for his/her stature to overcome peer review so that he/she assumes an academic equilibrium, and (c) has completely filled the neighbourhood around his/her desk.

(2) A "dwarf astronomer" is a scientist that: (a) is in an astronomy department, (b) has sufficient publication output for his/her stature to overcome peer review so that he/she assumes an academic equilibrium, (c) has not completely filled the neighbourhood around his/her desk, and (d) is not a postdoc

(3) All other staff, except postdocs, in the astronomy department shall be referred to collectively as "Small Astronomy Department Bodies".

Re:Neil Tyson

[14erCleaner]

Mike Brown discovered the planetoids that led to Pluto's demotion, but Tyson removed Pluto from a display at his planetarium, then wrote a book about it.

Mapping a Dome

[malkuth23]

There are 2 ways that modern projector based planetariums work. The easy way is with one projector and a fish eye lens. The lenses tend to run about 100k and the single projector will have to be very bright because of how spread out it will be. The hard (but arguably better) way is by mapping multiple projectors together. This will allow for a much brighter image because the brightest projectors available today are about 40k lumens. 8 20k projectors are obviously much brighter.

It takes quite a bit of work to map a dome like this. I spent close to 48 hours straight mapping a 90' dome for a party for Putin and I am considered very fast in the industry. Basically you project a grid and twist the points till the line up correctly allowing for about 20% overlap of the projections. You can use a modeler like Gmax or custom warping programs that most professional media servers have these days... We use Coolux - Pandoras Box.

Ideally all the warping was already done for these guys and all they had to do was plug their system into a live input card (capture card) and route their systems through the media servers at the planetarium. More likely they had to re-map it. They did an ok job, but you can definitely see distortion as the image moves between projectors. The bigger problem they are having is with sync. This is always a really difficult issue between multiple systems and one of the main reasons to use a quality media server. You can clearly see the computers are wildly out of sync at the end of the video. Even 1-2 frames of sync loss will be clearly evident in a projector blend.

Either way, the project is really cool. If anyone is interested there is a free open source media server out there capable of mapping domes and other 3d objects called vvvv (although it is a bitch compared to the commercial solutions). Pure Data is also worth looking at. It is an open source alternative to Max Msp which does related interactive video things.

Re:Neil Tyson

[Daniel Dvorkin]

One is an argument about terminology; the other is an argument about reality. They're not even remotely comparable.