Show Business, Part II

In Paradigm Shifty Things, I wrote about the changes from starballs and slide projectors to fulldome video in the planetarium community. By all means this is not an instantaneous switchover, and in fact I see a few years where we’ll have all kinds of theaters with all kinds of projection methods being used. It makes life complicated for those of us who produce content for these facilities, that’s for sure.

Currently Mark and I are re-purposing our collection of “old fashioned” shows (the ones that were formerly slide shows) into fulldome video. The more I do this, the more I realize that even fulldome is a series of “slide shows,” only those slides are whipping by us at 30 frames a second. I watched a colleague’s show a few times, one that has been hailed as the best of a new breed of shows, and it is an eclectic mix of 3D animation and still images used in imaginative ways.

Imagery and its uses poses some very interesting philosophical questions that range across issues of perceptibility, cognition, understanding, and memorability. Recently I was at a meeting in New York where we talked about visualizations and their impact on learning and understanding. Mark and I showed three versions of a scene from our recent Hubble Vision show. In one version we had a set of images of planetary nebulae appear side by side in a three-screen array that dissolved through 12 different images. We also showed the same scene with the images cross-fading to each other in one frame, and finally we showed the same images animated in a fulldome video version coming from the apex of the dome and moving off screen toward the viewer. Our intent was to show the many different ways the same visual information could be presented. One of the attendees posed an interesting question about what effect each of the different scenes had on audience understanding of the differences and similarities between each of the planetary nebulae depicted. The narration states that Hubble’s images of planetary nebulae showed haunting visions of destruction, leaving it to the imagery to convey a visual impact.

It was an interesting question, and one that I’m still mulling over in my mind. More importantly though is that producers have and will continue to make those kinds of choreography decisions for each show they do. In order to make effective shows, they have to ask themselves, “What’s the best way to use the imagery I have? Will an animation tell the story, or will the still image? What will the animation tell the audience? What will the still image convey?”

These may seem like “angels dancing on the head of a pin” question, but they’re at the heart of good visualization in any medium.

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