 What for a beautiful name star chamber That's the name of the historical small planetarium in Lubbock. I find son is producer a project manager and curator of Immersive media the following talk looks at the fascinating history of this just rediscovered star chamber and also gives a view on the possibilities Or it can be used in the future as a full-dome planetarium maybe for VR gaming engines If you have the impression right now To participate in a real a conference and a real Stage then the immersion would have worked already. So stage three for rife hands on Yeah, thank you and good evening. I'm happy that you are watching and that I can Tell you something about the a rediscovered star chamber in Lubbock. I will talk something about the history and the last half an hour and the technical developments and the possibilities and Also want to talk globally So if you're not the usual people who go to a planetarium get into the topic So at first the question what have I to do with a planetarium? Where does it? Well, it does the planetarium itself come from I am for quite a few years on the planetarium world and work for quite a while and the Experimental up Ron, which is quite a young planetarium which opened 2019 and You can see it on the top. It's one of the biggest planetariums in Germany and also in Europe on the right You can see a mobile planetarium with a mobile dome, which I Look after doing a film festival in Lubbock quite a classical Which also has a focal on immersive media in the last three years On left on the lower left you can see my colleagues on the Observatory Lubbock, and I'm also in their team and we are doing astronomy and Like my colleagues from the talk panel Fascination astronomy and on the right on the bottom right and there you can you see the way up to the star chamber Which I will show you now which is a bit of a hobby but also Mostly I work in help run in the experimenter with like half A job and then the rest time I work freely and also mainly in Lubbock. I Originally a designer and made in my Thesis I work with 360 degree media mostly videos at that time and VR came later and Like the name expanded reality says that way you cross the borders of media And that's what I want to show in my talk a bit more detailed and why it makes fun and the The word immersive media, I don't think I have to Explain it in our society here, but we can I can explain it more detail if there are questions and I will now Show you Planetariums more how curious they are maybe look and I am from the northern German area So the lower upper left is in the planetarium in Hamburg Which is a place which I long to from my childhood. It's an a water tower and we will see more Later we will see more pictures of domes and on the upper right is Planetarium Chicago almost I thought it's the planetarium how my Hamburgs are almost 190 years. So it's not On the lower right, it's in Beijing. It's not so plan terms are not only a product of the Western world and on the left lower left. There's the planetarium in Alexandra, which is also a very spectacular Planetarium and it also has a slight Star Wars flair the planetarium itself is invention of the 1920s and It was the one. It was called the wonder of jena big Objects company invented this kind of projection with a project projector and like on the right We have projected on a dome and you can see on the left how many people wanted to go there and it was on the company size oops, I didn't want to tell it but 1925 was then also shown in the German Museum in Munich and since then planetariums are always around the world and they are almost a thousand installations and It's mostly about science communication especially for astrophysics and planetariums are also having a paradigm change away from the astronomy and astrophysics and Looking into other sciences and that's also my role. I want to work interdisciplinary and want to make Experimental new shows as you can see in the science down here In the experimenter, but it also That it doesn't only linear shows but also interactive events are organized So that's my lab my laboratory is the mobile Dome from the Libic movie days, which you see on the lower left Which we are a camera films a water ball and I Projects into cupboards and on the red on the right you see a VR and There is a module in a unity environment so the You can see the image from the virtual environment Which is projected as a full dome format onto the dome and it's very interesting and you have new interaction Possibilities and new techniques and technologies and 2018 was the jubilee of the And I was in a In Lund I made castin Anderson and there was the star Kamar the of Copenhagen and he said hey Ralf you are from Lubbock. I have someone from Lubbock and I was very excited and oh you have a star projector from Lubbock that can't be and Yeah, it's from a business from Yena and I couldn't take it really seriously, but I went with this information home and go to the city archive and Found actually something about it and There was a business which built a planetarium in business In Lubbock and it was very exciting for me and that was the first historical Passion for me and I was looking for it and with many ways I found at some point at the Star chamber Which is exactly the same word as in Danish and I found it in the school primary and school St. Jürgen, which was When it was founded it was called the close day art school and you can see the dome made from kappa on the image and I Was fascinated with it and I looked into it and tried to find out what there was and 1931 in the late 20s the Number of futiles rose and the city of Lubbock thought about building new Schools and they wanted to make a new type of school reform school and It was very political at that time after the in the time after the first world war the As a time ended and there was a new way of thinking And they wanted to have a whole thinking and thought skew newly And there was the magazine limeron mont and there was a school There was this very extraordinary school with nature science laboratory and you can see Microscopes and physics laboratories chemistry laboratories photo laboratories and it was very special at that time and it was also special that The the teacher thought about Installing a planetarium and it was really new at that time as we just heard and it was from Jena and I haven't found an explicit source, but it must be clear that the School politicians found out these things this development from Lubbock and found out and and the site Technology worked only for big planetariums and there was a new development So it was high costs. There were high costs and Therefore they couldn't pay the planetarium from the school so But they were fascinated to Look into the end universe as part of a Science Understanding of the world and then they thought about doing it there on and then there was a physics teacher the dr. Hans Kasselbaum wanted to do it and He It invented his own kind of planetarium and he realized it with an electro technician and The school politician names about Schwarz and they made their own independent planetarium and Made dependent and became one from Munich from 19 33 two years after the opening of the school and after the opening of the star chamber and It wasn't only a projector, but also a whole Planetarium a whole pilot solution. It was called Teach an age so they Tied the They severed their connection to the company's company while honoring them, but they stressed that they had a different solution So that was different to the highly developed solution by the company Where they had just a point source of light here as you can see in the technical drawing and this point source was Shown through a sphere Kind of like a camera And you can see the two developers here Hans Kasselbaum the physics teacher and and snartiga the electrical engineer Who had a workshop in the old city in the old town of Lübeck and that's how the development looked This is a professional promotional photo that they took you see the sphere And you can just make out the holes and at the top of it and you can see a number of switches And they have functions that we will talk about later because we you couldn't just switch on the projector on and off with those switches You could actually simulate the tilt of the earth's axis and the rotation with the knobs, but you could do even more I have an overview chart here On the left you see the projector in a dark depiction and the middle top image shows you a modern Image from today with a red background that I'll talk about later and on the right you see Something this is a solution that they developed it. You don't normally see they have They have this plaster Surface on the dome and they put small lights into that You would think that you would use LEDs these days, but these are so-called Telephone string lights the kind of lights that would be used in switchboards the telephone system and On the low left you can see the switches there every single constellation could statically be switched on and off This way and this way you had a didactic presentation of the various constellations and show them and As you can see on the top left With darkness you would see the stars lighting up and children could see the whole sky and sky and search for constellations so they're definitely didactically a very interesting approach and they had a Shadow of the city of Lubbock on the horizon and Perhaps to answer a few questions. It wasn't just the northern Hemisphere that they could show but also the southern hemisphere so they The spheres could be exchanged and project the southern sky that way And what it's interesting what it's important for me to stress out that this was not a static thing that was built in and then operation it was to enthusiasts work who can continue developing it further and Where we are today, I'm going to talk about later if we've modernized it We are actually continuing a tradition that has been there all the time at least in the 1930s there was the inauguration and then Some switches were brought to the center of the dome to make it possible to operate the whole system from there and In the 70s and 80s, there was a wooden paneling that was brought in you can see that so that was very good for the acoustics of the place and These wood paneling was used to lower the reflection sound reflections in in the room And jumping forward now to the present and through this acquaintance. I made in Denmark. I was actually Stumbled upon the historical roots in Lübeck and I Talked to someone and they were very surprised In the school that someone was interested in in this chamber that had been Kind of dormant there and in when they had an anniversary and and had a new building that they moved into as you can see in the image There was a euphoria that broke out where people said, okay Let's go into that star chamber and see what new technology you can put in there the head of the school knew about my activities At the festival with my mobile dome and asked me whether what I was doing in the mobile dome I could maybe make to make get to work in in their Fixed installation to the video projections that I made and Now I have to digress a bit here. You have two people in the background here. There was another important actor that came along because what happened was I was still doing my historical research in parallel and I actually came across The descendants of mr. Kasselbaum and You can see Christian Kasselbaum his grandson Who? Didn't know a lot about the family history His grandfather hadn't talked much about his invention on didn't leave many notes and when I confronted him with this whole story and and the Was able to give him the whole context He was very surprised and since early this year. He's actually retired and was looking for a new hobby And immediately he said he was going to get active on this and he even went as far as Donating some of the new technology to us a new project that I'm going to talk about so this Trial here the head of the school Christian Kasselbaum on the left The grandson of one of the two inventors and me in the middle we went ahead and digitalized the whole start chamber and the intention was to Still maintain the historical device not just for historical reasons, but This was a device that really was able to encourage enthusiasm and With a video projection system. We wanted to have a digital imagery in the dome and We chose a system with a media server That was very variable and was able to Combine all kinds of systems in a linear way And we wanted the whole electrics be controlled through A kind of control as you would have it in a smart home And the So-called cove light the margins of the dome the lighting for that We wanted to replace those with modern rgb leds and of course we wanted to add sound It's important to know that at the time we only in in the early days There was only a kind of presentation talk kind of situation no sound installations We were we added that and the whole technology should be should be so simple that the teachers in the school and the students Who are very busy not just in the times of the pandemic, but they always are very busy preparing for lessons They want they would they should be given a technology that they could start with straight away So it should be very easy to operate. That was a very important objective Um something that's easy to learn and easy to use And you can see a few pictures here from the rebuilding works um We found a whole historic cables and there was A pedestal that we had to remove We had this mechanism for Switching parts that i'm going to talk about we installed sound And we had an extensive rebuilding process here And tried to make it as minimally invasive as possible to preserve the charm uh of the olden days and uh the only see is the addition of the new Protection technology you see the results here And you can see The old projector is still in place on its new founding foundation You see this wheel here Which you can use to Kind of Get the old projector down And put the new one in place. There is a schematic depiction here If you turn this wheel the old projector the star or is Lowered down to the right and the new projector, which is a fairly large device from then from the event uh business That can stereoscopically project things that comes up And there is a lock the uh this pedal that may remind you of a sewing machine the red one Now that that locks the whole device so that the Exchanging mechanism is controlled And uh, this is how a digital projection looks in the old dome You see the various Dots here that the black dots as you can see those in the stream This is where the old active lights are still preserved and the protection is Moved to the screen And a new curiosity at something that was never Intended this way, but there was an old historical table Uh, which we added and on that we put a computer for the media server With a software that we developed which controls all the video signals in the various formats and Projects it into the dome And the circular grid shows you the dome actually Yeah And the controls here Of the electricity electrics Um Again, that's an application from the smart home area customized for this purpose And on the left upper left you see the old star projector that you can switch on and off Something you would be doing earlier On the switchboard that you saw with these old switches old plastics this is all moved to this now and redundantly also there are Um, there is this keyboard here you see the historic Signs here With all the constellations on them And you can operate those without the tablet But of course using the tablet is very elegant because you can control everything And uh The video projector can be started that way. So, um, and so on Um, I prepared a small video from two to three days ago and I will play it now. Um, and you see how I After the Star light was um turned off and changed the couple the dome edge light on blue and Um And put the video projector on and um change from the old to the new projector To the full dome, um video image the test image and you see it goes up and the You barely you need to use any force. So, um, it's very fine made so every, um Teacher can do it and I will go out of the picture and I start a full dome video sequence and I film with my phone into the dome. So you get a slight impression How it looks if you are in this, um, dome and the far metadome and um watch this video And I jump forward in this video. Um, you can see here 306 video video And um those videos were fitted to the dome and multiple CGI scenes And uh, we're jumping a bit around It's not only astronomical, but um many different, um topics It's a small trailer of of topics that are relevant for the school and um It's not only science, but also art and music videos And I will talk later. So you can do a lot of different things and you get a feeling how it is It's not that easy on a video stream Normally, I would have said come over and I would tell you later in the discussion how you can come to us and What are the applications of our modernized? Star chamber. So the old projector should be useful furthermore and we also want to use the active alighting Star constellations we want to use full dome videos Planetarium movies, there are quite a few of them to many different science topics and Obviously, it's a planetarium So we are using a planetarium software A classic a stellarium or something like world war telescope Open space. There are quite a few different Applications one of the bastion bar turn Um, he helped me quite a lot to fit them to our system and he helped me To have a live projection geometry and you can add video feeds which you Usually would only use for vr display at this place or for 360 degree tours So they are rendered live on the dome But you can also use standard images videos and websites and If you have ndi and 360 degree screams, which you can also use and If you have game engines like in unity and there is a really nice plugin which you can Use to make a from a 3d From 3d seem to a full dome Scream and then you can take from a gaming situation in from unity, which you can send from unity into the Stardome and so So you can see a live image from everything from an in character situation from again You can install controllers and lighthouses and it works quite well and quite classically you can use Um Get a video from a capture card of an hdmi stream when you're using a camera, for example And for the school, it's great because you can also not only look at astronomy and physics, but also add Informatic computer science and game big also Are Arts music biology everything that happens in school even theater or sports can be realized and there aren't any boundaries for the fantasy And that should also lead to that the pupils themselves will be active and there are working groups of the pupils Where there will be more of them and the pupils already made a project with a virtual tour of the school And the children made virtual tours and you could use it as a Second time in the star chamber and what's also quite interesting is the cooperation With the observatory in which team I also am where I am also a member and for us and the observatory The astrophotographies are really it's really interesting to can actually present it properly And here are some pictures from oliva and from the milky way And it's also really great because we have a new dome in the Observatory and you can make a 360 degree camera and with I You can see here the replica of the observatory dome and As a 360 video or image and what's also quite interesting if there was There was a meeting of the Nordic Planetarium associations and the moving days also had something and there are lots of colleagues came there And they were all really did it all really great with me together And in two years there will be a hundred years planetarium and the star chamber will make An important role because it was before in the international scene of the planetarium. It wasn't Recognized and as the goal it should be acceptable for everyone. Thank you for your For your listen and I wish for a visit for of a visit Of a planetarium your possibilities there are the Times also flies like in this talk where many people have Listen closely and watched And unfortunately we can't Give immersion how many people Are thankfully clapping and are looking with their open bright eyes and for listening fascinated Thank you very much and as feedback directly at the very first intense feedback Really great Talk and More interested questions And what you said at the end And I really want to go into the planetarium again that already influenced it Which other words Can you Well that went to me I guess first of all Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about this too It's a huge huge pleasure to be able to do this here and thanks for the praise So what can the star chamber do it's very hard to limit actually Everything you could display as a 3d data set or register Could be reproduced and that's the interesting thing in these days. This is so interesting because You have this exploding Degree of 3d registration through photometry Through 3d scans The technology Is getting more and more simplified and accessible and We have all kinds of 3d models that are being created museums that have originals that hopefully they would Restitute They return to their origins. They they create models of those And that is an important aspect too, isn't it? It's simple to For a teaching person to to Communicate us And uh, yes, and that's the interesting thing for me with a colleague I am actually developing something using rs unity to make an application for planetariums accessible And for the star chamber too that you can put into a planetarium and then just put your Specs the glasses into the corner and You have the You have a normal 16 by 9 screen whose image you simply put into the dome rather than onto the screen There are two modes you can have an object mode Which you can use to kind of take a 3d object into your hand You can almost understand it that way because the controller then represents the object And we use scans of beetles from the zoological gardens in keel near lubeck and I was able to turn the controller and that would turn the beetles model in the dome you could Kind of show the interior of the beetle show its jaws Of course Usually inflated size and it can be done in a room mode as well. I can walk through rooms and I can use models that have been registered by a photogrammetry and the great thing in this immersive media is that the screen With its limited frame Is overcome and if the image goes around your head you actually are In that space and the replication of the original is very real and very close My sample mind I my first idea was the Making an eager sugar in the four meter couples But this idea what you just said to go on is a question. Is there Technology for the living room to have a realistic star Star sky projected on the walls. Well, that's If I think of this multi projector setup If you you could build this beetle in the living room, there are systems for actually compensating for the overlapping projections and all that actually Low cost these days If you can't build a dome you have a cubed shaped room cube shaped room You have applications like this in universities these cave solutions They are just as immersive and the nice thing about a dome and that is a kind of a plea for having a dome rather than A rectangular shape is that the corners are not as visible and the projection The illusion is kind of distorted by the corners in the room And in a dome the room is kind of dissolved more perfectly, but that's just details. It can all be realized And what you developed there was again being mentioned from lubeck. Yeah, that is the case and I call this the sun clock This is a Globally unique solution Something I couldn't put into the top with the limited time this star ball This black sphere Does need to be in the geometrical center of the dome to display the stars correctly, but the projector With it's with its Fish eye lens are in the same room. They are in In their in their respective way and that's why I had the solution of Willing the one in and the other out and there is no synchro planetarium worldwide, which makes us very proud that we came to this idea We actually continued the work of the founders It's actually an homage to them Who came up with their own do-it-yourself solution and it's a great feeling to have this heritage And use it exactly at least the idea. Thanks for this star How were in the old technology the stars were projected on the Dome was there a certain measurements or Well, that's a really interesting in this lubeck solutions. It's quite difficult to show You can't see my mouth. I think in this black dome in the surface. There are small Um holes may Drill in and through this hold the most important stars of our shown Ralph