Virtual Reality Celestia

[ldeviveiros]

Hi

I am an Astronomy TA at Brown and we are planning to port Celestia to a virtual reality enviroment called the Cave for use in class.

We found Celestia a few weeks ago while searching the Net for ideas for new Astronomy labs and demos for the students. Once we learned that it is open source, we decided that we just had to port the program (or something like it) to the Cave, the virtual reality room at Brown, run by the CS dept. How cool would be to be able to walk into Celestia and touch the planets?

We have contacted the Cave team and we have their full support. They run programs written with OpenGL, and use programs freely available, like VRJuggler and others whose names I forget.

We are recruiting people with OpenGL experience in the CS department, but it would be very helpful if anyone in this forum with Celestia experience was willing to lend a hand or give some words of advice.

Has anyone ever tried such enterprise? Also, are there any programs similar to Celestia that are already compatible with VR enviroments?

If you have attempted something similar to what we are trying to do, or know of someone who has, please email me soon.

Thanks!

Luiz
luiz_deviveiros@brown.edu


PS.: Chris, you might have received an email from Prabhat about this - we (me and Gideon) are working with him.

[mccdo]

I am interested in porting celestia to VR Juggler as well. Are there examples that describe out to use a third party renderer? Thanks for the help.

Doug

[selden]

Doug,

You might take a look at the Web site http://www.lsi.usp.br/~paiva/glass/glass.htm

It describes a port of Celestia to the Cave environment using Glass.

Please keep us updated on your progress!

[edit]
A google search for
celestia juggler cave -juggling
located more documents describing the process.
[/edit]

[t00fri]

Hi

I am an Astronomy TA at Brown and we are planning to port Celestia to a virtual reality enviroment called the Cave for use in class.

Since this is NOT a US American forum, could you please be so kind and explain your acronyms: What is a TA?
I know it for professional reasons, but I bet many non-american users don't.

F.

[selden]

Fridger,

Unfortunately, that posting was more than 5 years ago.

For those who don't know,
TA = Teaching Assistant
It's a job position often provided to graduate students during their first few years at a U.S.university.

[t00fri]

Selden,

thanks anyway for explaining. Like you are looking after the politeness of people, I try to correct far too self-confident US american habits by some

We are actually loosing quite a lot of money in Europe these days, because you guys have been borrowing a bit much recently . Never mind... I know such explosive subjects are off limits.


F.

[mccdo]

Doug,

You might take a look at the Web site http://www.lsi.usp.br/~paiva/glass/glass.htm

It describes a port of Celestia to the Cave environment using Glass.

Please keep us updated on your progress!

Thanks! I believe I found your paper earlier or at least I recognize the screen caps from a paper that I found earlier today.

Doug