[As this story from Elon University in North Carolina notes, creating a planetarium that displays a star-filled sky in virtual reality isn’t new, but Elon senior Aubrey Spicola is extending the concept by using mixed rather than virtual reality to recreate the experience of attending an interactive instructor-led planetarium session. See the original version of the story for a second image; more coverage is available in an October 2024 story from Elon; for more about Aubrey and her work see her LinkedIn page. –Matthew]

[Image: Senior Honors Fellow Aubrey Spicola tests her Honors Thesis at Innovation Hall on March 24. Credit: Photo by Nia Bedard | Elon News Network]

Senior aims to show off the stars using virtual reality

Honors fellow develops thesis project of a virtual reality planetarium

By Nia Bedard
March 30, 2025

Senior Aubrey Spicola will never forget the first time she watched a star being born.

She was taking astronomy during the fall semester of her freshman year and one of the first labs she participated in was looking at nebulae, giant clouds of dust and gas that are remnants of dying stars and beginnings of new stars, and she was in awe of what she witnessed.

“We looked at the Orion Nebula through the telescope,” Spicola said. “I could make out this little blue and pink smudge in the lens and I was like, ‘Oh my God. Stars are being born in that thing.’”

At that moment Spicola, now a senior astrophysics major and honors fellow, had figured out what she wanted to spend her life studying.

“I found out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” Spicola said. “This is it, this makes sense, I like it. Every time I come back I see something interesting and I was like, ‘Why not?’”

After taking astronomy her freshman year, Spicola continued immersing herself in the stars by working a job at the Schiele Museum of Natural History and Planetarium during the summer of 2022.

“That’s when the James Webb Telescope images came out,” Spicola said. “I just thought it was so cool, and we held a watch party there.”

Spicola worked there throughout the summer and through the first semester of her sophomore year, and during that time she started writing planetarium shows for the museum. After deciding to leave the job in December 2022, Spicola returned to Elon with a different decision to make.

What would she create for her thesis?

As an honors fellow, part of the program includes students engaging in the study of some sort of defined problem or question over the course of one and a half to two years.

With Spicola’s major in astrophysics and her love of planetarium education, she was able to develop her thesis with the help of her mentor and astrophysics professor Dr. Anthony Crider.

“The idea of research was so daunting to me, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Spicola said. “I talked to Dr. Crider and he said, ‘Well, I haven’t done this a while, but what do you think about a VR project?’ I was like, ‘That sounds pretty cool.’”

As a part of the thesis development process, each honors fellow has a faculty mentor to assist them with the creation of their thesis.

“She really wanted to do something just a little bit more creative,” Crider said. “Something a little bit that sort of tied to her love for teaching people about astronomy.”

Previous Elon students have created projects utilizing Virtual Reality and astronomy such as Sam Kahle’s ’14 Interactive Media project which taught users about phases of the moon and Anna Sizemore G ’20 who created a VR interactive game where the user points out constellations in the sky.

Spicola’s honors thesis is a virtual reality planetarium app that allows users to see stars and planets as well as listen to an instructor, who is also wearing a VR headset, guiding the user through the VR planetarium.

“Being in a planetarium and having a live show is an experience,” Spicola said, “But it’s not something that you can get at a school like Elon. In virtual space, you can do pretty much anything.”

While VR planetariums are not a new concept, Spicola adding an instructor makes the app mixed reality, which according to Crider and Spicola had not been done before. This means that the user can see both virtual and augmented reality.

Having settled on her thesis, Spicola began testing out the Meta Quest 3, a VR headset she got for Christmas, teaching herself how to code in C# and slowly started developing her app using the game development engine, Unity, to prepare for her thesis proposal in the fall of her junior year.

In addition to teaching herself how to code, Spicola reviewed pre-existing literature that utilizes VR. While she didn’t find any research about using VR to create a planetarium, she ultimately discovered that she wants VR to be a bridge when it comes to education.

“I would like to get it to the point where someone can take this and then do more of an education focused project with it,” Spicola said. “If you’re learning constellations, or if you’re learning about the motion of the sky, I want to see what kind of effects this application has on the education factor. I think it’s a very powerful thing to take something that’s two dimensional and now you have it in 3D in a virtual space, rather than just looking at a lot of screens.”

Now in her senior year, Spicola is focused on pushing the app further. She and Crider meet twice a week to test, discuss and edit the new versions of the app Spicola brings in on a weekly basis. According to Spicola, the app is now in a place where the user can see a clear sky full of stars and see and communicate with the instructor.

“The multiplayer works,” Spicola said. “It can be kind of flaky right now, just like with different objects that you might be handing off to another player. We have the star field in there. We have the ability to see each other. We know how to orient it correctly, all that kind of stuff.”

While Spicola’s thesis is functioning, the app is meant to show how virtual reality can be used in education rather than creating an app.

“This is meant to be sort of a proof of principle, a pilot project,” Crider said. “We’re not a software developer house. It’s not like a team of us working on this, but it is something that was really interesting, and I thought it would be interesting to the larger community.”

As Spicola heads into the final months of her senior year, she’s preparing to wrap up her thesis, which she hopes showcases the educational capabilities of virtual reality, and move on to graduate school next fall.