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NEW YORK -- Hundreds of people saw the light -- and the music -- here Monday night, thanks to a supercomputer running Linux, a team of video artists and one of the world's biggest virtual-reality simulators.
SonicVison, a new show by the American Museum of Natural History and MTV2, blends technology, music and animations displayed on a 6,550-square-foot digital dome into a brain-melting fiesta of sounds and sights.
Set to open to the public Oct. 3, SonicVision features a musical score with tracks from Radiohead, Coldplay, Queens of the Stone Age, David Bowie, the Flaming Lips, Stereolab, Fischerspooner, Boards of Canada and Moby.
Viewers watch as spiders spin webs that mutate into swirling mosaics. Aliens dance while fireworks explode. A volcanic explosion descends, sweeping the audience into space, where whirls of melting color mutate into hundreds of blinking eyes, which then morph into wheeled machines on the dome's 69-foot-wide, 38-foot-high ceiling screen.
The music was mixed into a seamless presentation by Moby, who said he long has been interested in space and astronomy. Moby began work on SonicVision six months ago.
"When friends asked me to describe the SonicVision show, I've had a really hard time because it is completely different from anything else I've seen," said Moby.
For decades, the museum's Hayden Planetarium delighted city school kids with its classic constellations-on-the-ceiling space show. Older kids went to the Friday night performances, which featured lasers zipping around the planetarium's dome accompanied by the tunes of Pink Floyd. It was the ultimate in late-20th-century cool.
But recently both the planetarium and its laser show had started to feel less cutting-edge and more like one of the museum's collected antiquities.
So out with the old and in with the new. The planetarium has been redesigned and renamed. It's now the Rose Center's Hayden Space Theater, a 4 million-pound structure billed as the biggest and most powerful virtual-reality simulator in the world.
SonicVision doesn't feature lasers. Instead, visitors get to really see, feel and hear the music via huge 3-D visualizations generated by the museum's supercomputer.
Its new supercomputer, that is. Halfway through the preparations for SonicVision, staffers realized the museum's 78-processor supercomputer system was just too sluggish to process the 9 terabytes of data that make up the SonicVision show.
Happily, Sun Microsystems donated some hardware, adding 40 servers to the planetarium's existing 78-CPU cluster computer. The system now boasts 72 Intel Xeon processors running Linux and 46 SGI MIPS processors running the Irix operating system.
"Ever since the Rose Center opened in 2000, we had the idea of creating a new kind of music show that would take advantage of the Hayden's unparalleled technology and visual display system," said Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History. "SonicVision updates the popular laser show genre just as the Hayden Planetarium's digital dome has revolutionized the presentation of planetarium content."
The planetarium's dome was designed to display data in three dimensions. It works great with star shows, but it really excels with abstract imagery. Some people at the press preview clutched at their seats or companions during the show, fighting off the feeling that they were going to catapult into some alternate Matrix-type world.
The visuals were created by a team of 19 digital animators, including employees of Curious Pictures, a producer of television shows for the Cartoon Network, artists Alex Grey, Perry Hall and Darrel Anderson, and video jockeys Bionic Dots, Benton C., Madame Chao, Atmospherex and Vishwanath Bush.
Video jockeys use moving images and audio clips to create art, manipulating visual and sound data in the same way DJs mix records.
The animators for SonicVision used an assortment of scientific visualization applications and standard animation programs including Filmbox, Maya, XSI, Shake and Virtual Director to create the imagery for SonicVision.
Sound analysis applications were used to make the images move in time with the music, which is piped through two 24-channel digital audio players and several hundred strategically placed speakers.
Five hundred low-frequency shakers under the seats and on the floor of the theater produce interesting vibrations that certainly add to the experience of watching the images as they are projected by seven high-resolution video projectors mounted on the planetarium's walls.
SonicVision cost about $600,000, not counting a $1 million donation of hardware and software from Sun. The show is now a permanent part of the museum's offerings and will be presented on Friday and Saturday evenings.
