Project Website

A small project website has been created and launched today, showing some media and information about the StarSound Project. It can be viewed here:

http://starsound.clemens-anzmann.de

Artwork

Some artworks and design have been created for the StarSound Project for promotional and demonstration purposes. A still and an animated logo, as well as an icon are now giving the project a face and a design.

Floor Visuals

If there will be the possibility of an additional projection onto the floor projection for the data visualization, this is what these visuals might look like:

Screensaver

As the installation won't be constantly in use, the idea came up to create some sort of a screensaver or a demo to show all the features of Stellarium and things to show. For this, a Processing sketch was created, that controls Stellarium to randomly activate different visuals while flying through the star field.
Here's a demonstration of the screensaver:
(unfortunately it runs fairly laggy, as the screen recording required quite a lot of calculation power)

The code of that processing sketch will be integrated in the sketch interpreting and translating the Kinect input to control Stellarium. When no user was recognized for a certain amount of time, the controls (simulated key press functions) will change to the screensaver until a new user enters the installation.

Update of Moving Images

After having posted mostly screenshots only, here's an update of different moving images of the visual outputs of the installation:

Animated Poster (landscape format)

Final format will be widescreen rotated by 90°

Animated Poster (portrait format)

For demonstration of portrait format, final piece will be landscape rotated by 90°

Stellarium Nebula

Style of zooming in to a nebula (floor projection)

Stellarium Star Images

 Demonstration of possible feature of displaying star images on the floor projection

Sound Design

Since a good sound design is very important and supportive for both, immersion and interaction, creating the all the sounds for the project must not be done on the last minute, which is why the main focus on today's work has been on interaction sounds and soundscapes. The sound design for hydrogen itself is already partly implemented based on the One-Minute Physics example and the Rydberg Formula already mentioned in one of the last posts.

Different synthesizers where examined with Logic Pro in the Cork School of Music to find inspiration and suitable sounds for the following issues:

• Kinect: Hand found
• Kinect: Tracking... (while scanning)
• Kinect: Hand lost
• Kinect: Search for Hand
• Stellarium: Scanning... (while being tracked)
• Stellarium: Star selected
• Stellarium: Viewpoint Movement
• Error
• Fatal Error (will hopefully never be heard)

 
Obviously, tracking and scanning are played simultaneously and therefore one sound file.
First examples to hear will follow soon after the evaluation and post editing of today's recorded sounds.

Animated Poster

Further Processing Sketches were created to continue the work on the visualization of the incoming data on the animated poster screen in the installation.
For the visualization of hydrogen, the Rydberg Formula and the corresponding Lyman Series where used. Inspiration for this came from 'One-Minute Physics': http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/08/minute-physics-the-sound-of-hydrogen.html
The background is created with gimp, showing a big star in the foreground and the orion nebula, descriptions and the model of a hydrogen atom. The poster will be placed next to the installation and react on the telescopes data and change accordingly to the current user's controls.
The final poster will be in portrait format.
Here are the first designs:

First Data Visualizations

A major challenge of the StarSound Project, to visualize the incoming data from the radio telescopes and to transport the science behind it.
The instruments at Blackrock Castle used for the project search  for hydrogen in the universe. Their sensor is calibrated on 1.4 GHz, which resembles the frequency of hydrogen. While scanning the sky, the amplitude of the incoming frequency of 1.4 GHz represents the amount of hydrogen at the particular position.
Hydrogen consists of a single positive core and is surrounded by one single electron. Furthermore, it has a crystal structure. All these facts will be integrated in the graphical and audio representation of the incoming data.
The book "Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology" [http://www.amazon.com/Information-Arts-Intersections-Science-Technology/dp/026223209X] was fairly helpful in getting started with the first visualizations in Processing.

There are two different position in the installation's space, where this incoming data has to be shown: On the interactive poster and on the floor projection itself, which will possibly be projected onto the star field projection. Here are some first interactive processing sketches:

Sketches and Setup

During the first weeks of the final semester, basics sketches for the technical setup of the installation have been created. The installation will have a large floor projection, showing an interactive star field, as well as a 5.1 surround system giving audio feedback representing the incoming radio telescope data. The whole installation is mainly controlled with the Microsoft Kinect. Floor pads to trigger certain events are considered at the moment, but not fully planned yet.
An interactive poster next to the installation shows details about the installation and the data it provides to its users.