Astronomers Rejected Our Milky Way: Making Smithsonian Starstruck /w Tomas Barnas

The Starstruck experience, it's [laughs] actually a immersive experience about space.

Uh, what does it mean? So it is like VR movie, which is 40 minutes and, uh, we are bringing you to various places in the space, but also on the ground, which are focused on, uh, the space discovery and study.

And, uh, we have 12 different stops or station where we bring you.

And what you can see right now, it's that, uh, we have here one flying astronaut.

That's our, like, stardust, uh, guide.

This guide is taking you through that space and explaining you the entire story.

But this is not a fiction.

It is like, I would call it like interactive documentary.

So all what you see, it's kind of approved, of course, not flying ship, but, uh, if we go further, everything what you see here was, uh, part of the, uh, research and study, uh, of the astrophysicist from Smithsonian, uh, which is, uh, the, the US Museum, uh, focused on, uh, study of the space.

And, uh, we were lucky to have, uh, astrophysicists, which are really like for dozens of years or for decades, uh, studying the space and giving us the, the introduction and, uh, informations about space.

And the entire story is starting, uh, on MMT, which is the telescope, currently one of the biggest ones in Atacama Desert in US, which is studying space.

So wa- was, was at least this one scanned or [laughs]...

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

So here we are studying.

It was not only, uh, that this was from the photogrammetry data.

Of course, it's cleaned, reconstructed because we are on the VR experience, which is headset only.

So everything needs to be super optimized because we don't have enough of performance.

But we are working here with the scan data, but not only about this place or this building, the entire surrounding, uh, was done from photogrammetry.

Plus, uh, unfortunately here, because of the dark conditions right now, but in VR you can see it, you have the entire skyline, and so we combine it with the satellite data as well.

So here we have photogrammetry data combined with satellite data to recreate exactly one-to-one position, scale of the space, and also the views which are representing the real place in, in Atacama.

So yes, this is our actually the, the, the core part of scanning, uh, as we know it.

So, uh, you can see the, the first level.

How did you-- If, if you're saying that, uh, that the sky and stars are based on actual data, like-

Yeah