We made a Virtual Reality cosmology show!
This winter break, a friend took me to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. This is one of the best space museums in the country, and had fascinating exhibits and movies about planets within and outside the Solar System, and the history of our attempts to explore them, going all the way back to Medieval timekeeping instruments. But when we got to the cosmology exhibit, my heart sank. The Big Bang! Dark matter! Dark energy! The fact that we can measure the how fast the Universe was expanding eight billion light years ago! How it looked thirteen billion years ago! Nothing. Some lame-ass screens full of text. None of the images, the mind-blowing technology, the methods we have to use to figure out what the Universe looks on the largest scales of space and time.
And Adler is not alone. Every museum cosmology exhibit I’ve been to has been woefully lacking.
So at the MIT VR Hackathon last month, I made a pitch to create a museum/planetarium show about extragalactic space. Self-driving car programmer Paul, computational biologist Diego, and the most impressive undergrad I have ever met, Beste, got on board. We loaded data from the Illustris simulation and visualised it in Unity (no small task). If you’re in the room with the VR headset and controller, you can fly around the space, toggle between views of the stars, gas and dark matter, and zoom in to see an individual galaxy in high resolution. For those of you further away, we recorded this demo, with a little spacey music and educational voiceover from yours truly.
I was already over the moon (ha) because I had daydreamed of this for almost a year and it came together in two days. And because we were such a day dream, and working on it was so much fun. But then we won the Data Visualization prize (thanks Fidelity!). And a mentorship offer from _underscore VC. And support from Rus Gant of Harvard and Scott Greenwald of the MIT media lab to develop this further.
So now I’m really excited about all the places we’ll go! I still have to finish my PhD, hopefully in about a year. But in the meantime, you can experience the show at the Cambridge Science Festival on April 13 – just grab your free tickets.
We’re adding more features, like data sonification and more interaction and would love to bring the show to museums and planetariums around the country (heck, world, if you’re reading this abroad!). So if you have ideas and/or contacts, please do hit me up.
