Star Central

Visiting Betelgeuse
Star Cinema slide show with music and narration
The closest stars model
Interstellar medium walkable model
Starship port
Star Style clothing store

Inspiration

I'm a member of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium of the European Space Agency's Gaia Mission, which has recently produced the first ever detailed maps of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. I wanted to showcase this exciting new information in easy to understand ways.

What it does

Visitors can use starships to travel to a dozen locations in the galaxy or stay at Star Central to visit many different exhibits to learn about the Milky Way in 3D.

How we built it

I have a detailed model of Gaia Mission data in Blender including hot star density, dust, ionized hydrogen, star clusters and the positions of more than a million bright stars and used this to create sky boxes and several 3D models.

Challenges we ran into

I tried to use the Gen AI system to add minigames to several exhibits (based for example on tetris or match 3 models) but in every case the AI failed to create even remotely working games.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was able to use Gen AI to create beautiful star and nebula patterns that I used as the background textures for the tops for sale in the Star Style clothing shop in Star Central.

I created three detailed 3D models of the closest stars, the local interstellar medium and a full scale Gaia Mission hot star density map and was able to include all three models in the Star Central world without any problems or even getting close to world capacity limits.

What we learned

I learned that the latest version of Horizon Worlds is very good at rendering complex 3D models but is still limited in supporting Gen AI coding projects.

What's next for Star Central

Next year the Gaia Mission will make available Gaia Data Release 4. This will have improved data and a new catalog of about 10 thousand newly discovered exoplanets.