Search

The Interactive Planetarium Project will design and build the software framework for connectivity between the Digistar 6 planetarium projection software and the smartphones of all audience members in the Jim and Linda Lee Planetarium. The goal of this project is to make planetarium shows more participatory, add a feature to our planetarium shows that many other universities do not yet have, and create a framework for future students and faculty to build from. To demonstrate our technology, we will make a real-time competitive trivia game able to support 60 concurrent users (number of expected audience members in the planetarium). The framework created by the Interactive Planetarium Project will serve as a unique opportunity that will allow future students to explore and create more complex interactive software within the planetarium with mass scale audience participation. The project will also be an additive to the current STEM Outreach program, gaining the attention of outside communities to this new experience provided at the Jim and Linda Lee Planetarium, with the potential to be used not just for video games played by the audience but also for interactive planetarium shows, surveys or group activities. This project is based on modern web programming paradigms as well as research in the Human-Computer Interaction space. Smartphones are ubiquitous and the ability for them to interact with the world around us is a frontier that is still being explored. This project aims to explore how smartphones can make shows and performances more engaging and participatory.