Not a Game Report

Last week I was in Philadelphia for a week long workshop on producing planetarium shows using Starry Night as well as Photoshop, Audacity, and various video editors.  We were treated to two major announcements from Spitz, Inc. in relation to the ever-growing digital planetarium field.  The bigger of the two announcements was a demonstration of a new program that will work in tandem with Starry Night, called The Layered Earth.  It had a very new interface which looked an awful lot like a Star Trek: Next Generation phazer.  The device projected a spot on the dome which allowed you to spin the large Earth or to point toward the edge of the dome (which popped up menus) and choose a new overlay.  The overlays could show earthquake epicenters or political areas or geographic features or demographics or whatever.  It was amazing....and it will be a standard part of any new planetarium order. 

The second announcement informed us of a new partnership with Spitz and a company named ChromaKey which makes lights for the planetarium (the lights to brighten the room).  ChromaKey is programmable bundles of LEDs which allow for quite a colorful show on the dome.  I can't wait until we place our upgrade order in a few years.

So, as you can see I was focused on this instead of gaming.  I did wonder how I could use some of the features in a game...or how to run a game in the planetarium.   Maybe I need to work on that aspect for a special game some day......