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>> Jonathan Fay: I'm Jonathan Fay principal architect on Microsoft worldwide
telescope. We have a special guest here today Tony Butterfield from the
Houston museum of natural science who is going to be showing us some very
cool stuff that they've been working on.
He basically is, does production for their full dome shows that not only involve
their planetarium, but also visualizing earth and environmental concepts and
things like that. So they've been really groundbreaking in the planetarium field
for quite a long time, including in the first full digital, full domed digital planetarium
system, back in 1998.
And they were the first sky scan installation for the full dome digital. They do
video production that is not only used for their own in-house internal shows but
also distributed worldwide. And their program also makes use of this adjunct
program that Tony's boss runs that distributes inflatable digital planetariums
through classrooms all over the U.S., I believe.
>>: And worldwide.
>> Jonathan Fay: And worldwide, yes. And so the shows are not only done in
bricks and mortar planetarium but as well as these inflatables that go all over,
and it's really kind of completely changed the way people think about
planetariums, anyway, without further ado this is Tony Butterfield.
>> Tony Butterfield: Thank you very much. My name is Tony, and I work at the
planetarium at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
The Houston Museum is one of the largest museums in the country but the
planetarium is one of the most progressive in the world.
What I'm going to talk about today is some of the changes that we have
contributed to the industry over the past 20 years. And I've played a big role in
pushing the technology to the next level. When I started in the planetarium field
over 20 years ago, there was just a big machine in the middle of the room. A
bunch of baby food jars, used for special effects, and a lot of slide projectors.
Back then, if you look at what was going on in 1991, we were working with a
whopping powerful system of Apple 2Es and 486 computers.
And I thought it would be fun to kind of take a look back at how it all started as far
as animation 20 years ago.
Over the years, I've tried to help push the new technology along in the
planetarium field. I'm like the beta guy that always has the prerelease version.
So in preparing this presentation, I got lucky and found the commercial that
changed my life for the better, that helped me get started, which ultimately
impacted the industry and what you see out there in the theater today.
What's fun when you look at these old commercials is the graphical interface or
some of the speed performance. And so I put this together just to have a little bit
of fun, looking back.
[video] transition, digital effect, digital effect. Graphic. Graphic. Title.
Animation. Animation. You're about to see. You're about to see. Was created
entirely with a video toaster from NewTek. Remember how it used to be in
science? They called it the paradigm shift, yeah. Paradigm -- what's that, one
historical moment, the sun revolves around the earth. Yeah. The next moment
enter Copernicus. And voila. The earth revolves around the sun. Shows you
how things can change. Right now. This very moment. As we speak. A
paradigm shift of equal magnitude. It's grabbed the world of video. A paradigm
shift. And the force behind the shift. We at NewTek call the video toaster. Hey,
that's a hot name. Yeah, and we assure you once you've seen what our toaster
can do, I'm ready, the world of video will never look the same again.
[music], yeah. Took a long time. What, it took 40 years for the computer to
evolve from the garage side to a desktop tool. But with the video toaster, it
happened as quick as snap. We're not talking evolution here. We're talking
revolution. Yeah. See, we used to be add to a VCR and editor and you have a
full-blown production screen. This is what I call a video revolution. That's just
what it is. And here's another reason why. Light wave 3-D. Light wave. With
light wave you have the excitement of three dimensional graphics. How does it
work? Easy. You begin by creating wire frame models, with the light wave
model. Yeah. Then you use the light wave renderer to give it three dimensional
life. Hey, that looks real. It's real, all right, real easy. You're the director. The
next Walt Disney. You position objects, camera and lights. Just by sliding the
mouse. Then when you're ready, light wave will animate your scene just like this.
Or like this. Neat. This, crazy. Or this. Yeah. And all this is included in the
price of the toaster? You bet, it's each piece of equipment you need to have real
broadcast television combined into one device with one easy-to-use interface.
No wonder I've heard so much about this. Now you know why. It's changing the
world of video forever. You see, when NewTek created the video toaster our
goal wasn't to be as good as, it was to be better. It wasn't just evolution. It was
revolution. Elite. A shift. Yeah, a paradigm shift. So buckle up your seatbelt,
Jack, and open up your mind and let the video toaster take you places you've
never been before.
>> Tony Butterfield: Well, that was a lot of fun. After I saw that and I had been
working in the planetarium field, the very first animation you saw was about
astronomy. And from that point on I was hooked. At the end of that video there
was a still frame of just one of the frames that was being rendered out. It took six
minutes and 49 seconds to render that frame out. And I quickly found out that it
takes a long time to make animation. Ever since then there's been a quest to
render faster and faster.
At one point there were even tricks of hooking up a deck alpha to the workstation
and the workstation did all the graphics and sent all the jobs out to the alpha.
I have another short little video that pokes fun at trying to solve those solutions,
and a lot of times when we're rendering animations, even 20 years later, there's a
lot of hurry up and wait. And so I wanted to show this to you [video] followed
along the course you're now the proud owner of a dedicated 3-D graphics station
costing only $65,000. Trust us when you say you'll be indebted to it for many
years to come. Today, we'll take a look at the many exciting past times you can
explore while waiting for images to render. Through the years, professional 3-D
animators have become pioneers in exciting fields such as dictionary proof
reading. And chess by mail. However, few things can match the exotic thrill of
learning a foreign language. [Foreign language] I'm waiting for the machine to
make a picture. [Foreign language] my machine costs more than a house.
[Foreign language] patience is a virtue. [Crashing sound] [beeping].
[Music].
>> Tony Butterfield: So even from then it was a slow start to getting any kind of
animation out there. Talked about backing up your stuff, how many of you have
your files backed up from 20 years ago? I was pretty impressed when I tripped
across my very first animation.
It's ten seconds long and it took a week to render. I found most of the frames,
and it stops a little bit short. But after getting the software, I wanted to be able to
contribute to the planetarium industry by making scientifically accurate
animations. And being able to create our own in-house animations was an effort
to make that possible. Back then, animations were recorded on a single frame
recording VCR. You would render one frame. The VCR would back up, record
1-30th of a second and we would wait and wait for another frame and that went
on for weeks. That was a whole lot of fun.
That's 20 years ago when I first started. But in order to get where we are today, I
wanted to take us back and look at a historical perspective of planetariums.
Planetariums have been around for thousands of years, as mankind's quest to
recreate the nighttime sky. In the beginning there were celestial globes that
depicted the stars and mechanical models which recreated the motions of the
planets. Shortly after World War II a German company named Zeis combined
the two and created what we know of as the classical planetarium.
The classical planetarium is probably the planetarium you went to in third grade
with a big machine in the middle of the room. Chicago was the first planetarium
in the United States to get one of these expensive machines shortly followed by
New York, LA. You know, the other major cities.
They were super expensive, and so a part-time planetarium employee decided to
create a low-cost version, and that was known as the Spitz Planetarium by
Armand Spitz. Thousands of these were sold because they were the
Volkswagen of the planetarium industry. If you go to most cities around America,
your chances are you're going to come across a Spitz planetarium.
As far as the digital universe goes, by the 1980s, the technology advanced
enough that we started to introduce computer technologies into the planetarium
theater. A military defense contractor named Evans and Sutherland that
specialized in aircraft simulations had a small little division where they put
together the first computer generated star field.
This was done by a high resolution or high voltage CRT that was underneath a
fish eye lens, and it allowed for you, for the first time, to look at the stars, not as
viewed from the surface of the earth.
This really changed the way educators could teach students the stars and the
relationship of the earth in the cosmos. The problem was it was all wire frame.
That's cool and fun and you can do a lot of fun things with wire frame. But it
would be 15 more years before we'd get solid objects.
Eventually you would have controlled, controlled planetariums where they would
have two or more systems running at the same time. Ultimately, one project had
a digital star machine and the top of the line optical star machine. But then after
a while it was just a matter of how much stuff can you cram into a planetarium.
More baby food jars. More spaghetti colanders, more slide projectors, and more
video projectors.
At that point in time, video projectors were like a small Volkswagen. And they
would put them up on steel pan tilt mounts and it was like trying to program a car
to look in a certain direction in the dome.
The thing about it was it got us started thinking about producing content in the full
dome format. But we were just using dozens of separate systems all dancing at
the same time to pull off the full dome experience.
If you went to a planetarium, you probably, chances are, went to a laser show. If
you were near a big city, your last experience of going to the planetarium was
probably seeing a led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd show. Laser shows were a very
important part of the planetarium industry, because in Friday and Saturday night
revenue, you could pay for all of your expenses for the rest of the week.
The laser show industry used the planetarium as a venue to develop its
technology and we embraced that in the planetarium field by ultimately creating
the first full dome laser system, which then could display a video, not a video, but
a laser graphic image across the whole dome.
So we have all these different systems going at one time or another. And from a
production point of view, it was really complex trying to keep all these balls up in
the air.
[Music].
I produced quite a few laser shows, and I actually found them to be a little bit
more complicated than doing video because you have to get every note of the
music. You have to get every tempo change. You have so much more
complexity going on. And if it's just not synched right then everybody knows it.
Basically, these were cell animations cycled through quickly, and so they all have
to be drawn out ahead of time, digitized and then reprojected out with a laser
projector.
We did a lot of cool things with lasers and combining them with educational
programs, because they could do color and the DigiStar could only draw a green
wire frame.
We actually used a combination of the two to tell the story and make it more of
an engaging experience. The Omni scan, like I said, was the full dome laser
system, and it would be combined with other equipment to create the same
experience.
Right about that time digital video was becoming more common place, and the
first use of digital disk recorder was introduced, and that is the concept that
everybody knows of today as Tivoing but the idea of recording a video sequence
on to a hard drive and having it play back.
That was a big breakthrough in the sense that you didn't have to print to a single
frame recording VCR or you wanted to make edits just like typing a paper you
would just cut and paste. I was one of the first people to use a disk playback
system, and we were sitting around in a conference and I said, you know, some
day we're going to be shipping shows around on these hard drives.
And it will be, you know, easy to be able to share content between city and city,
because then you wouldn't have to worry about how many baby food jars they
had in order to make the special effects.
What we have today is basically multiple channels of those disk playback and all
combined together at one time.
As we got more sophisticated with the technology, we also had to mature in our
production styles. Not only did we have lasers going in all parts of the dome, we
had analog projections that were made either with painting, rotating pieces of
glass or shower curtain. Slide projectors.
But the whole concept of how to produce for the full dome was starting to take
place. One of the first things I pointed out was as you moved in and under and
around things, you had to proportionally change the point of view of the object.
Up until that point everything was edge-on, and it didn't quite work right.
So the idea is that if you were to go underneath the planet, you should be able to
see the bottom of the planet. And since I could make the animations, then it was
easy to incorporate into the show. Then came full dome video. The concept of
being able to take all those different video projectors and combine them into an
edge blended system became available. There were earlier attempts that didn't
quite make it. But in 1998, the technology became available and we were the
first to install that at the Houston Museum.
What we have is a multi-channel edge blended system, and depending on the
specific location, it might be six projectors or eight projectors, or in some places
they've tried with 12 projectors, but the whole point is there's not one single high
resolution video projector that can cover the surface of the dome so in order to
gain the resolution we have to combine multiple projectors together.
This is what we call a dome master. It's basically a fish eye format projection. In
this format, the bottom of the screen or the bottom of the image below the
satellite dish is what we call the front of the room.
You have to imagine if you're sitting in your chair in the planetarium, that the
satellite dish is at the bottom of the room, the east on this image is the left side of
the room. And the back of the room, if you were to turn around and you see
would be at the top of the image where it says north.
This is the standard format that we use to trade content between other
planateriums, and this makes it allow for the quality of production to be shared
from big productions down to small cities and maintaining the quality of the -- the
value of the production.
These are some more examples of the dome master fish eye format. We can
take panoramas and stitch them together and have it properly distorted. And on
the right-hand side we've even gone so far as having a fish eye lens on the
space station, and they regularly send us pictures so that we can incorporate that
into educational programs.
Later on I'm going to talk about how our next project is to combine all those years
worth of astronaut photography into a show.
One of the things that has stayed consistent over the years, be it high tech digital
or old fashioned analog is this debate from one institution to another of what's
called live versus taped.
50 years ago, it was a live operator with a pointer standing in the middle of the
planetarium giving a lecture, and answering questions by the audience.
In contrast to live, then you had a prerecorded soundtrack. It played the same
music, same presentation each time. The advantage to that is that the school
kids got to see the same thing each time and could be consistently tested to
make sure that they were exposed to the same material.
Today in modern times that debate is transferred to the future. Not from live
versus tape. But to be real timed through a graphics image generator or
prerendered in a production.
So the same style varies from institution to institution and the method of
conveying the information. That's the debate that will never end.
The gap between the big planateriums that had full dome systems and all the
other cities got wide. The big cities who had the money and could buy the big
systems quickly leaving behind medium-sized cities, museums, educational
institutions, and so we received the grant to create the first portable full dome
system.
This is an example of an inflatable dome much like the one that's out in the
hallway. Our very first full dome system was using a fish eye lens and a video
projector and since we had a surplus of slide projector stands sitting around we
thought we'd strap it to that. And that was the first portable digital video
projector.
All the way back from 2004 and 2005. The problem there is that the glass is
insanely expensive. That lens is $16,000 alone, and it's married to the design of
that projector, so as soon as that obsoletes, you're stuck with an expensive piece
of glass.
Plus, we would send these out on the road each day to part timers to go to
gymnasiums at schools and if they dropped it or you've got an expensive
package in a small spot. So even though that was an affordable solution to the
multi-million dollar full dome planetarium, that was still an expensive little
purchase. It obsoleted very fast and we tried to come up with something better.
In 2001 I saw an example of an alternative to the fish eye, but you gotta
remember back then we were still dealing with NTS video, and so anytime you
take standard definition video and you stretch it over 50 feet wide, you see scan
lines and pixels, and so although the concept of putting an image up on the dome
was mathematically feasible, we didn't have source material to be able to deliver
to it.
In 2001, I saw a demonstration of the concept of bouncing a video image off a
spherical mirror, which, much like with telescopes, takes the cost saving
advantage of using a mirror instead of a lens to display the graphics up on to the
dome. It turns out that what I call a warped fish eye image is basically in
software 360 degree fish eye turned back on itself.
Many of the software packages these days can create a fish eye image we just
need the portion that covers the dome.
What we have done since then is we've made a portable self-contained system
that you can use to take on the airplane or in the back seat of a small car, but
then you're not married to a piece of optics. In this picture here you see a
standard pro summer video home theater projector spherical mirror and right
about here should be a flat mirror.
Basically what the optical path is, is the light comes out of the video projector, off
of the flat mirror, and then hits the curved mirror. What we do in our content is
we predistort it in the content so by the time it hits the curved mirror, the curved
mirror straightens it back out when it hits the dome.
Now, that is a huge breakthrough and a cost savings, because you can swap out
these projectors because the mirror doesn't care, and if you bang up the mirror
you can swap that out pretty easily. So it's off-the-shelf technology. It's easy to
do. It's something that people can relate to, just like with astronomy, you have
advantages with refractor telescopes and you have advantages of reflector
telescopes, where we're incorporating that same technology into a low cost
portable solution.
This is an example of the opening of one of our shows in what I call this warped
fish eye format. The -- [video] the dead center front of the room is right around
the word full, and as you move along the bottom of the image, so this is the front
of the room. This is the left side of the room. This is the right side of the room.
And this all -- all this back here is the back of the room. This is 16 by 9. So it
can be displayed off of a Blu-ray player or it can be edited in standard
off-the-shelf home editing software. So you don't need special format or special
aspect ratio. [video] energy destruction turned into it. For the most powerful
events in the air over the ocean and even from the sun we reserve the title force
five. [video].
>> Tony Butterfield: When you see that in the dome it's pretty scary. I wanted to
stop right here, because this also introduces some of the other things that we
have been doing in Houston. And that's almost everything in addition to
astronomy and the other sciences we've been expanding.
The most obvious is earth science, looking back at the earth and so in this part
we're going to tell a whole scene about ocean currents and wind currents affect
the weather but the whole point is that the planetarium is not just for looking at
the stars, but also teaching earth and other sciences.
We have just in order to be able to survive in our own institution, because it's a
major institution, we have competition within our own building. We have an I max
theater, we have a butterfly center. We have two or three exhibits. A couple of
gift shops.
So we're not just trying to get the visitors to come to our building, but once we get
them to our building we're even fighting to get them to pay money for a ticket to
go to one of our shows.
This is a collection of some of the movie posters that I brought with me. And we
have learned that because we are low man on the totem pole when it comes to
marketing and budgeting and things like that we have to go along with what the
museum is doing. So over time, if the museum gets a big exhibit, in order to take
advantage of what they're doing and ride along on that marketing train, then we'll
go ahead and produce a show that corresponds with that.
I don't know if the titanic exhibit has made it through museums in this part, but we
had the titanic exhibit so we made a planetarium show that went along with it.
We also worked with scientists during the international polar year. We worked
with polar scientists and glacier scientists to create a show that helped us learn
about ice on our planet so we could better understand ice on other planets. That
was called Ice Worlds. One of our most successful shows of all time was
something that we, it's one of those one hit wonders you are just shocked it
happened it's called erstwhile dried it's now translated into 18 different
languages. It's shown around the world. And basically it's a story of a
grandfather on the moon with his grandkids looking at earth.
And he's telling to the grandkids what it's like to be on the earth and why it's
green, why it's white, the way it used to be. And so it's a story, and it's been the
most successful.
We're kind of making an updated sequel to that next year and I'll talk a little bit
about that. Our biggest project has been to get ready for the demise of the
planet. The end of the world is coming, and so we prepared for that. [video].
>> Tony Butterfield: And yes we do sacrifice some of the -- [video] it's an intern,
that's where they all go. And we had actually a lot of stress over the sacrifice
scene. We showed it to a lot of board members and special discussion groups.
Do you show a sacrifice to kids at a museum. Well, if you're going to be truthful
to the culture of the people of that time period and to show what it was like back
then to keep the sacrifice in would be accurate to the context of the people. But
then if you've got little kids, you want to really explain to them that they're
scooping out a bleeding heart and showing it to everybody in the audience.
So we are offering that show in two versions. That show opened two weekends
ago, and it has overnight tripled our attendance over the weekend. So that might
be our next big all-time big hit. The end of the world is only going to happen in
the United States. If you actually talked to the people that are in the know in
Central America or Mayan people, the Mayan believe in time basically looping
kind of like when we go from winter to spring and things start over and bloom and
blossom again. It's just a repeating cycle of one cycle after another for them.
And so if they were here, they're actually going to be out partying and
encouraging it to happen as the sooner the better.
So that's American media. I want to talk about what's going on now. It's like
hurry up and waiting with the hardware.
>> Tony Butterfield: Would be accurate to the context of the people. But then if
you've got little kids, you want to really explain to them that they're scooping out
a bleeding heart and showing it to everybody in the audience.
So we are offering that show in two versions. That show opened two weekends
ago. And it has overnight tripled our attendance over the weekend.
So that might be our next big all-time big hit. The end of the world is only going
to happen in the United States if you actually talk to the people that are in the
know in Central America or Mayan people. The Mayan believe in time basically
looping, kind of like when we go from winter to spring and things start over and
bloom and blossom again.
It's just a repeating cycle of one cycle after another for them. And so if they were
here, they're actually going to be out partying encouraging it to happen as the
sooner the better.
So that's the American media. I want to talk about what's going on now. It's like
hurry up and waiting with the hardware. Well, now the software is finally catching
up.
A lot of the high end 3-D packages now either have plug ins or built into the
camera rigs the capability to render in a fish eye format. But there are more
software applications that are on purposely including in their design the fish eye
format to be able to display their software into the dome.
One of the best pieces of software that we've been working with so far is the
worldwide telescope project with the help of Jonathan.
I started working with him a couple of years ago about what it might be not in a
desktop version but in a educator's planetarium operator's version. And since I'm
a content creator, I've been bugging him like crazy on tools, on how to make stuff
real fast.
I've started incorporating the worldwide telescope into my production workflow
and already in two shows I've quickly been able to add content to our shows with
the help of worldwide telescope.
There's a couple other software packages that's worth mentioning. As I had said
before, live versus tape or real time versus rendered.
One of the other areas that we're aggressively looking into as far as real time,
and that was made possible with game, affordable game engine called unity 3-D.
With unity 3-D we've been able to distort the graphics to properly match the
dome. And we've created an educational game that goes along with the Mayan
planetarium show.
So that they can both watch the production, learn about the people and then as a
team go in with assignments and task cards and explore the city of Takal in real
time. The whole problem has been well who gets to drive has been eliminated
because as you work as a team somebody's the geologist, somebody's the
biologist, somebody's the navigator, and then everybody has a job and you have
to find certain things on your task card.
And so that's how we're combining unity 3-D as a game engine to quickly
generate the full dome graphics. It also has allowed for me to do previsualization
of scenes, complex scenes very fast. And so we were able to as a placeholder
put a scene into our Mayan show to see if it was going to work, all created in
unity 3-D. Once it passed inspection, then we sent it off to the render farm to be
ray traced and properly textured.
The future of Full Dome Production has a long way to go. It's starting to get the
attention of other film producers. The live action capability of being able to
capture a full dome image is a little bit challenging. There's a higher than HD
camera called the Red where people have tried to put a fish eye lens on to the
front of the Red camera. It's a huge waste of pixels because the fish eye lens
truncates the CCD, and you pay a lot per pixel.
One of the things that I did was I got what's called the Ladybug, and it is a
camera system that has six cameras pointing in different directions, five along
the horizon and one straight up. This brings up a whole new area of
cinematography challenges. Where do you put the camera crew when you can
see everything around you. Well, in this case I had to be the camera crew
underneath the camera. I, with a couple of batteries and a backpack, and my
camera system, walked around Central America and everybody thought I worked
for Google Earth or something.
But we have looked at that as a way to set up a scene, and we used it for the first
time in the Mayan production.
It's awfully expensive, and it has some shortcomings. One of the other
alternative -- oh, this is a fun shot. I was, I got up in the wee hours of the
morning to watch the sunrise at this temple. And these girls walked up right in
the middle of my time lapse photo. So I said hi and I was nice to them. But I'm
hiding there under the camera, and they're like: What's that? And so that scene
is not in the show. But this is what the Ladybug captures. I poked something on
this screen.
Basically the Ladybug -- if I hit it again -- oh. The Ladybug, like I said, takes a
two-by-one lat long image, and the only blind spot is underneath it. And that's
why it's black on the bottom.
Once we get it out of the Ladybug format and into the production pipeline, it's
good because then we can composite CGI elements in the foreground and use it
as a background.
But it's the first attempt in a full dome production to use real world photography
and there's more to come.
Just a brief note, I don't have a picture of it here, but like you'll see here, where
we're taking a video projector and bouncing an image off the mirror, well, I've
done some testing of reversing that process and putting an HD camera or higher
than HD camera in place of the projector so you capture what comes off of the
mirror and it's already in the distorted format, because it's 16 by nine and it's
already in the distorted format you could quickly edit together your show and then
play it back through your media player and you have the proper format. You
have 30 frames per second. It's high resolution. And I think that's a good way to
go.
Much like any toolbox, there are better tools for some scenes than others with
the fish eye format that was more suitable in some scenarios than using the
mirror, the ladybug might be better for other scenarios. So there's not a camera
that can solve all your cinematography questions.
You now need to have a toolbox to be able to pick and choose as a producer
what you want to draw upon.
Some software tools being used in our current production. I've quickly come to
enjoy the Microsoft ice panorama stitching program, and that is a program that is
capable of taking pictures that were pointed in fairly close, if you're -- fairly close
in the same spot, it will stitch together real fast. Worldwide telescope, like I had
mentioned, allows for us to image content and with its frame output capability
quickly be able to have it reviewed to be edited or to expand on to.
Microsoft Photosynth is the -- and what I'm using it for is along with the
astronauts that took pictures for us inside the space station, they're now taking
the database of images of the outside of the space station and running it through
this process.
And as I'm modeling and setting up the scenes, I'm able to look at the space
station from different points of view that are in registration.
That's helped me out a lot in my current project. Then there's a couple other high
end panorama stitching programs, your standard PhotoShop after effects, and
I'm a Lightwave fan.
One of the things I really wanted to leave on is the astronauts who have
volunteered their time to take pictures on the space station. Their time is so
choreographed that they have to get a note to go to a baseball game.
And when we came to them with the idea of taking a fish eye lens into orbit and
taking pictures for us and sending it back down to help teach children what it's
like to be in space, it had to be at their own free time, if they wanted to do it.
And we started out with 100 speed film in 2007. And since then we've been
using high resolution camera bodies. This picture on the right is actually a good
shot. This is another example of, well, this is actually a panorama in the fish eye
format but there's a couple of key astronauts in there that has taken a huge
amount of pictures inside and outside the space station. And that's Mike Bear
and Jeff Williams. And I think Jeffrey Williams is one of the key people that did
the photosynth collection.
Astronaut Scott Parazynski is on our museum board, and a few years ago when
they had the crisis in orbit where the solar panel ripped apart, he was the one
who got sent out to fix it with a set of cuff links. That was the mission that they
were going to take all of our pictures, but since they had the emergency to deal
with, I ended up with 19 good ones.
So we were happy with 19 good ones. And from there we kept encouraging
them to take more. This is down in NASA on the left-hand side. This is a part of
their training facilities that are eventually going to be given away. But we took
down one of our portable planateriums like what you see in the hallway, and we
let them take pictures and then look at it in the dome format, but then what we
also figured out was it's about the same size of what was going to be the
constellation capsule.
And so we started to write a grant to teach kids about the future of the space
program and the constellation spacecraft. Well, we submitted for a grant.
We got awarded the grant. And then a week later NASA cancelled the
constellation space program. So now we have a grant to teach about the future
of space and space exploration but no vehicles to talk about.
These are some more astronauts that eventually went up a couple more times
with three of our fish eye lenses and hopefully in the next week they'll take some
more from the Cupola which is the new window that looks down on the earth.
This is another -- this is Nicole Stott. She went up and she was real helpful on
taking pictures for us. And sending them back down. But every couple of
months everything changes around. So trying to teach kids what it's like to be in
the space station, it's always changing. Vehicles are coming. Vehicles are
going. The insider is getting rearranged. I went to go look for where the
bathroom is and the bathroom is now moved to another part of the space station.
Now the robinot is now sitting where the bathroom used to be.
Now we've finally got enough pictures to be able to see how things have changed
before and after and be able to see and teach the kids. So that's our next
project, is to teach about space flight, human space flight, going to the orbit, and
then beyond orbit to the moon.
This is a preproduction version of a scene for our next project of going to a lunar
base on the south pole of the moon, and just to remind you, when we're looking
at this, the front of the room is down here. Directly overhead is right here into the
left is over here, and behind you is way up here. So the action, when we
produce our content, is what I call the sweet spot about 35 degrees up, because
when you're sitting in your chair, you kind of get a field of view of 100 degrees
wide or 120, 130 degrees wide, 80 or 90 degrees tall.
Now, we don't currently do stereo projection in our planetarium. Stereo
projection has been done in several different methods. It's very impressive, but
much like Hollywood, the verdict is still out if it's worth the extra trouble to render
everything twice.
Some of the newest technology involves rendering 8 K. That's a circled rendered
image that's 8,000 pixels by 8,000 pixels if you're talking about rendering time
that's a lot of rendering time even on today a computers. Stereo means you
have to have two channels and that's like two sets of 4 K which still adds up to
the same amount of render time.
And so it's fun to watch. It's engaging. It's impressive. But is it really worth the
extra cost to render it out given the limited funds there are to do some of these
projects, it's still kind of up in the air.
Most of our projects are funded all or in part by grants. And so we have to cover
certain scenes in the show that's paid for by some grant. And we end up
recycling some pieces from previous shows, editing them together with new
shows. Get new grants to do old stuff. And so we do the most in Houston with
the least amount of money.
And so this is our current production. That's about it for an introduction to the
digital planetarium. The portable planetarium that's out in the hallway. How we
have come from a ball with holes poked in it and light shining out to a big
mechanical machine in the middle of the room to these digital projectors that
allow for us to create these amazing images.
This is one of my favorite photos that we got back from the Cupola. And it's a
little bright. But the fish eye lens is looking at a cell use spacecraft. The tail of
the orbiter is off on the side. And, oh, there's another shot where they put the
fish eye lens closer to the window and then we can see it all at once.
The problem is is what we wanted to do was to be able to do a complete orbit of
the earth with the camera. And that would mean maybe taking a frame every five
seconds. But they can't take high capacity cards into space.
So they have a shoebox of like eight gig cards. And so you can't get many
frames at 27 megapixels or 21 megapixels and have a worthwhile sequence
because anytime you take the card out, you bump it, it's never the same.
So we're kind of ->>: Is there a reason?
>> Tony Butterfield: X-rays. They get -- they get damaged. So they can't be
flight rated. The high capacity cards can't be flight rated because you take the
chance of not getting any of your data so it's better to get a lot of your data all
over the place than maybe not get your data at all.
>>: The technique?
>> Tony Butterfield: The other problem, which is a big stress, I guess it's an
internal stress because when I brought it up everybody kind of like is like why
can't you just write to the laptop hard drive? Well, NASA, like a lot of places, is
grouped into different departments and that's another department which that
whole concept is out of balance.
So the quest for a nice image sequence is still yet to come. And as time -- the
problem now is -- and me being from Houston, and I live on the side of town
where NASA is, is most everybody's been laid off. In fact, the people that we
worked with, the photo TV group, is no longer there.
And so I went to go to call who the next in command is to be our contact person,
and it's really hard to get somebody on the phone. So it's a little sad in the sense
that we've lost a heavy lift vehicle, a lot of people in Houston are now thinking
that they had a really cool job that they would have forever. They now don't.
And so now they're having to look for jobs. But it's really kind of put a halt. And
in the museum field, we are informal educators. And so we -- it's education that's
not in a classroom. We're trying to teach the kids why to take math classes, why
to take science classes, what kind of careers. And so we're trying to give the
kids a glimpse of what might yet to become. And it's from the NASA point of
view, we're kind of in limbo right now. So that's a hard story to tell kids.
The future of commercial space flight is promising. But they have a long learning
curve, and trying to tell that story is going to be a while. This is one of my
favorite shots from the cupola. And I'll just leave it at that. If anybody has any
questions. I'm going to need a few more minutes to do some alignment, if you
want to come back and look at some of the worldwide telescope in the dome,
that can be fine as well.
>>: Will you have a preview of the show as well that you can do for ->> Tony Butterfield: Yeah, I have to transfer this laptop out to the portable. So
it's a little bit of unplugging and plugging things up, but we can show you some
really cool stuff.
>>: About how long do we have?
>> Tony Butterfield: Well, a long coffee break.
>>: Okay, what, 15 minutes?
>>: Yeah.
>> Tony Butterfield: That's it.
>>: Thank you.
>> Jonathan Fay: Well, thank you very much, Tony. Appreciate you coming all
the way out here and we look forward to seeing the show. For those of you who
are watching on the recorded version, we're going to try to get some of these
videos from the dome demos captured so they can be edited and added in. So if
that works out, you'll see more video after this. Thank you very much. And we'll
see you guys later.
[applause]