Instrument: One Antarctic Night (IOAN), is a multi-participant immersive artwork that visualizes and sonifies astronomical data collected by the AST3 robotic telescope during its first antarctic night — four months — of operation.
In IOAN, participants float between the earth and the Large Magellanic Cloud surrounded by a sphere of raw data generated by their interactions. (View video on Vimeo.)
Participants wade into a field of data-derived objects. Each object is generated in real-time from a data set containing 758 million data points representing 817‚373 astronomical objects. Data analysis drive each object’s appearance and realtime animation.
In IOAN, natural and intuitive gestures trigger complex database operations.
Participants can select objects by picking them up, and filtering operations are initiated by striking the surface of the data-field creating a tidal wave.
IOAN was first exhibited in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery (2018). Its unique scalable architecture which allows for realtime multiuser immersive analytics and interaction with over 817‚373 data objects was published in Electronic Imaging Proceedings of Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality, 2018.
IOAN was created in collaboration with Ruth West‚ Violet Johnson‚ I Chen Yeh‚ Zach Thomas‚ Eitan Mendelowitz‚ Lars Berg‚ and others. For more details and a full listing of collaborators visit the IOAN project website.