StarSightVR combines planetarium, VR tech to create immersive, real-time, distributed astronomy experience

[This application of VR could bring a planetarium’s entertaining and educational real-time, communal immersive experience to people around the world. I wonder if the inputs could eventually be live from an earth-based or even orbiting telescope… This story is from Astronomy Now and more details are in the press release from the Royal Astronomical Society. –Matthew]

Stellarium view of Edinburgh sky

[Image: An image of the sky above Edinburgh made using Stellarium open-source planetarium software. Users of the new headset will see a similar image, but will be totally immersed in the view. Image credit: A. Lawrence.]

Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2015 – report 3

By Kulvinder Singh Chadha
Posted on 8 July 2015

[Science writer and editor Kulvinder Singh Chadha presents his third report from the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2015 (NAM2015, Cyfarfod Seryddiaeth Cenedlaethol 2015). Around 500 astronomers and space scientists will gather at Venue Cymru in Llandudno, Wales, from 5-9 July, for the largest regular professional astronomy event in the UK — a conference that will see leading researchers from around the world presenting the latest work in a variety of fields.]

[snip]

Oculus Rift + Stellarium = virtual reality planetarium

An exciting way to experience the night sky using the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset was shown during a demonstration at NAM2015. Professor Andrew Lawrence of Edinburgh University outlined a project, provisionally called StarSightVR, in a talk held the previous day at the conference. This was followed by an open demonstration today of the headset running Stellarium. The project was conceived and developed by Alastair Bruce, a PhD student at Edinburgh, and was first demonstrated at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in April.

Stellarium is an open-source planetarium application that anyone can download and use. The Oculus Rift is a much-publicised virtual reality headset, designed primarily for the gaming market. The idea behind StarSightVR is to marry the two in order to create a truly immersive user-experience, where one feels they are surrounded by the night sky. The hope is that the setup can be used for online planetarium lectures where users could connect to the server using their own headsets — using similar techniques to that of massive multiplayer online gaming.

Besides being a lot of fun, teaching in this way has obvious advantages. “I’ve always loved showing the stars to people, but now I can guarantee perfect, cloudless skies and show the Universe to people all around the world while they stay in the comfort of their own homes,” says Bruce, who was unable to attend the conference himself.

A grant from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) enabled Bruce and Lawrence to buy the hardware and employ software engineer Guillaume Chereau to adapt Stellarium for the Oculus Rift. It is still at the testing phase and they are keen to get user feedback. “By January/February next year, we want to be able to start doing testing trials with, say, 50 users to see if the server can deal with it,” says Lawrence. But more funding is still needed to make the system robust enough to have it ready by then.

Volunteers using the system at the conference found it an interesting experience, including the author of this piece. As Lawrence himself says, the colour-correction is still a little off and resolution drops off away from the centre of the field of view. This is because Stellarium wasn’t written specifically for the Oculus Rift and so is not yet fully-optimised for it. However, as one moves their head around the sky, it tracks very smoothly. Various features that would normally hobble astronomers in the real world, such as the ground and atmosphere, can be easily switched off. One can go to any time or date and to any location on Earth (or even off it).

At the moment the sky does look as if it’s projected onto a flat screen (albeit one that conveniently curves as you move your head around) and this is because the feed to each eye is the same. Thus there’s no stereo vision. But it’s one of many things that Bruce and Lawrence will work on — depending on user feedback. They also have plans to develop the project for other virtual reality platforms, such as the Samsung Gear. The addition of stellar parallax information is one feature that may appear in future versions. This would give one a sense of depth and distance between stars, which is something that would be impossible to experience in real life.

For more information: starsightvr.org.uk ; www.stellarium.org

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