Planetarium show puts viewers onboard fateful ship

Planetarium show puts viewers onboard fateful ship
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BY JADE BOYD
Rice News Staff

A new multimedia planetarium program that combines ”fully immersive” computer animation with the latest scientific research is allowing visitors at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) to experience what it was like to stand on the deck of the doomed ocean liner Titanic the night she sank.

”Night of the Titanic” shows the unique conditions in Earth and space that — coupled with human errors — contributed to the sinking of the ship on April 15, 1912. The program, produced under a grant from NASA, currently is showing at the Burke Baker Planetarium in conjunction with the museum’s ”Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit.”

The planetarium show uses a pioneering new style of multimedia programming called ”Globe Theatre,” which combines traditional planetarium content such as starfield projections with digital animation sequences that fully immerse viewers with action in front, behind, above and on both sides. ”Night of the Titanic” is the third program produced since 1998 by a partnership that includes HMNS, Rice University and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Rice scientists oversee scientific research and content for all ”Globe Theatre” productions.

”Since full-dome digital projection technology debuted in Houston in 1998, a half-million people have seen ‘Globe Theatre’ productions at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History,” said Patricia Reiff, professor of physics and astronomy and director of the Rice Space Institute. ”With more than 20 planetariums now equipped for ultrawide digital theater, programs like ‘Night of the Titanic’ can now be used to educate even more people about the wonders of earth science.”

Unlike other wide-screen theater systems that are designed to project film images into a viewer’s peripheral vision, ”Globe Theatre” uses the full planetarium dome, completely immersing viewers in the program. A half-dozen projectors, each controlled by its own computer, simultaneously display six individual, interlaced frames on a planetarium dome. Each computer-generated frame can take up to eight hours of processing time to create, and 150 frames are required for each second of programming. The resulting files are enormous — about 65 gigabytes in the case of the 20-minute ”Night of the Titanic.”

”Night of the Titanic” uses the latest scientific research to determine what led to the sinking. For instance, a greater than average number of icebergs formed off the Greenland coast in the spring of 1912. That year also was the coldest spring on record for the 20th century, and more icebergs were sighted in the North Atlantic that spring than any other in the century. Astronomers also recorded a notable lack of solar storms that year, which meant there was no aurora borealis to aid the Titanic’s watchmen on that fateful, moonless night.

”Night of the Titanic” also illustrates the human factors that played into the tragedy, such as the radio operator of the doomed ship ignoring ice warnings from nearby ships because he was busy sending private messages for passengers. The program shows how NASA uses remote sensing technology today to protect ships at sea and astronauts in space.

”Globe Theatre” and sister projects ”Earth Update” and ”The Earth Forum” are the major components of ”Museums Teaching Planet Earth,” funded under a $2.1 million grant from NASA’s Office of Earth Science as part of the ”Earth Science Information Partnership.” Each of these projects was created by Rice’s Department of Physics and Astronomy in collaboration with HMNS. The programs are being field-tested at HMNS and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The Johnson Space Center, the Department of Geography at the University of California at Santa Barbara and TERC Inc. are providing additional input about scientific content. Projection expertise and image display software expertise are provided by Sky-Skan Inc. and Sybil Media Inc. The Titanic scene renders were created by Home Run Pictures Inc., with additional resources from Evans and Sutherland Inc. For more information, see < http://earth.rice.edu >.