Science Astronomy

PLANETARIUM
Researchers team up on out-of-this world film for planetarium opening

Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

2/1/2000

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- While collaborating on a dramatic digital sky show that promises to dazzle audiences at a newly constructed planetarium in New York City with never-before-seen images of the universe, University of Illinois art and design professor Donna Cox wasn't quite herself.

To her colleagues -- most of whom worked simultaneously with her in real time at remote locations -- Cox appeared on their workstation monitors in the form of a disembodied, animated yellow smiley-face icon. Likewise, her colleagues morphed into icons of their own, otherwise known in the vocabulary of the wizards of virtual reality as avatars.

In reality, Cox herself was at the U. of I.'s National Center for Supercomputing Applications, in the virtual reality lab known as the CAVE. There, outfitted in VR glasses and magnetic tracker wand, she worked hand in hand with members of the National Computational Science Alliance's cosmology team. Team members included Mike Norman, who like Cox, was at the supercomputing center; Brent Tully at the University of Hawaii; Jeremiah Ostriker, Princeton University; and research scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The glue linking them all together and enabling them to render animations from huge datasets representing galaxy clusters and other astronomical bodies was a software program called Virtual Director. The tool was developed in 1994 by Cox and two other artists: NCSA's Robert Patterson and Marcus Thiebaux of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the U. of I. at Chicago.

The result of the collaboration involving Cox, Patterson, the cosmology team and software specialist Stuart Levy is a four-minute visualization segment, which Cox said gives audiences the sensation of " 'flying' -- from Earth, out of the Milky Way, through observed galaxies and into the superstructure beyond." The visualizations are part of a 17-minute opener for Hayden Planetarium programs using the Digital Dome System, the showcase of the museum's new Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, a 333,500 square-foot exhibition and research facility scheduled to open Feb. 19.

The space show was created using astronomical data provided by Tully, along with computer simulations from Ostriker and postdoctoral researcher Paul Bode. Data from the planetarium's own database as well as those of NASA and the European Space Agency also were incorporated.

Cox said the virtual fly-through captured in the animation represents "a snapshot view of today's universe." And that snapshot reveals just a small section of the big picture. "We're still looking through the hole in the fence and seeing only a part of the elephant," Cox said.

With the completion of the grand-opening show, Cox and collaborators are moving forward with a new project: directing real-time programs at the planetarium from NCSA's CAVE.

More information about collaborations using Virtual Director -- including images and movies -- is available on the Web at http://virdir.ncsa.uiuc.edu/virdir/universe.