About OpenSpace

OpenSpace is open-source software that aims to visualize the entire known universe in accurate three-dimensional space. It is mature science visualization software that can be used by anyone to tell stories about the cosmos and our place in it.

The Project

Over the last years it has gotten more popular to generate prerendered movies from interactive software and OpenSpace is no exception. Most recently the VAST movie that is screened at the Visualization Center and dozens of other planetariums was created based off an interactive flight path in OpenSpace. Currently, a movie about the Apollo+Artemis missions is in production using the same techniques. For flat-screen images, many shorter explanatory videos have been made for YouTube or TED.

For each of these projects, creating the movie was a cumbersome process that required manually maneuvering the camera and interacting with OpenSpace in real-time. Due to potential user errors, this process has to be retried many times until a good result is created as OpenSpace currently lacks the editing tools to fine-tune existing flight paths.

The aim of this project is to remedy this by creating a tool that is able to create a timeline of actions that can be edited in a user-friendly way and then saved into an existing format so that OpenSpace can play them back either in real-time or use them to render out a video sequence to be used on a flat-screen or in a dome theater. Conceptually, one possible way to achieve this would be to create a layer editor similar to Adobe Premiere or other video editing tools, but instead of video or image layers, different settings of OpenSpace are controlled and manipulated.

The decision about which software stack to use for this project is still open, but it would either be a Qt-based application or a React-based web application depending on the applicants' skills and preferences.

Application

Please send an email indicating your interest for this or other thesis works to emma.broman@liu.se including your CV/LinkedIn and a Ladok transcript of courses. Also include an explanation of why you are interested in this specific project. If you are already a pair wanting to work on the thesis together or you are interested in multiple thesis works, a single email will suffice.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.