Space Centre Visit

Today we visited the National Space Centre in Leicester. We visited the space centre to experience the range of interactive displays using different aspects of multimedia.



One of the most exciting displays was inside the space theatre, which is a huge state-of-the-art, multi-media, domed theatre. In here, we watched a magnificent space show presented in 360 degree 3D. The space show used a number of different multimedia elements including 3D animation, surround sound, and stop motion animation. Visually, the film was fantastic and made the audience feel as if they were actually moving.



I was very interested in finding out more about the making of this film and I found a brief step by step of how they went about filming and creating this extraordinarily complex film. Obviously, because no footage of space had been shot in this format, all the footage had to be animated and created digitally using a 3D modelling animation software package called 3D Studio Max.



The music and the sound effects really helped the overall mood and added to the realism of the film. The film was presented in surround sound and sound effects were cleverly heard from all around which added to the realism and demonstrated another clever use of multimedia elements which increased the films dramatic experience and help the audience engage I found that this film increased my understanding of space travel in a whole new way as the multimedia elements kept my attention through out the film, without distracting my attention too much with the visual effects.

Another interesting display used green scene technology to project you onto a space background. The idea was that you had to lie down on a board and push yourself up which, on screen, made it look like you were floating in space. Similar multimedia elements were used in another display which allowed you to present a weather forecast in front of a blue scene which had a changing weather map being project on screen. This was a very effective way of learning how weather forecasts are done by allowing you to actually have a go at presenting the weather in a mock up studio, using similar technology used in real weather studios.

One display that I was disappointed with was the astronaut training game. The display used touch screen technology to allow the user to interact. Touch screen technology is an established and common way of interacting with the computer and is a simple way to communicate with the display. However, the display was very difficult to do the challenges that were asked using touch screen. One challenge involved pressing buttons on the screen as soon as they lit up, in order to test your reaction speed. However, the majority of the time it would not respond quickly enough to my reactions and I often had to click twice until it finally recognised the command. From a user’s point of view, this was very frustrating. I thought that it was using technology that was not really suitable, and it could have worked better using real buttons that lit up instead that could respond quicker, when clicked once.