The Planetarium

Myself, Jonathan Green and Steven Davis went to visit the new digital Planetarium at Millennium Point, Birmingham. It's a giant aluminum dome that has a set of six overlapping projectors around the circumference. We watched a demonstration of the system. It consisted of a tour of the stars starting from a British night sky then flew through to a view from the moon. This was done using a wireless PDA and joystick. When we looked at the possibilities for out work we all came up with quite different ideas and concepts. I won't go into these yet but what was very useful for us was the very helpful Mario Di Maggio who runs the planetarium. He showed us the workings of the place. It all runs from a standard xp server running software that we can hack into with C.O.D.A. system myself and Jonathan are working on at the moment. this means we could control aspects of the projection with sensors, phones, dancers, mikes and anything else we can think of. The real challenge of the whole project will be the 3000*3000 resolution needed. This then has to be distorted to allow for the shape of the dome. Anyway further details to come...