NAPA - Planetarium Software powered by Unity game engine

Presentation theme: fulldome

As an operator of five planetarium locations across Thailand and many more opening in the coming years, the National Astronomical Research Institute (NARIT) receives on the order of 100,000 planetarium visitors a year. In order to continually improve our services and cater to both the visitors and operators specific needs, we opted for a new planetarium software that’s developed in-house by our own software engineer. The software »NARIT Astronomical Planetarium Application« or »NAPA« (which also means »sky« in Thai language) is written and runs on the Unity engine that is normally used to create computer games. Most planetarium software currently in the market would normally function using 2D mapping of geometric shapes. However, by working in a game engine environment, we found that many astronomical phenomena could be replicated simply as a natural result of the geometry utilizing the 3D environment rendered by the game engine. Instead of circles drawn into a map, stars are rendered with real spheres of polygons that rotate around the camera in the virtual space, allowing the user for maximum control over the appearance. Moreover, real topographic data for each planet's surface features are mapped and render them accurately in 3D. This allows for details such as the shadow of lunar craters or Olympus Mons to be rendered with options to scale up or down the altitude difference for more visual emphasis. The real-time rendering aspect could also enable many short 3D sequences to be played at the control of the operator. More importantly, due to its nature as a cross-platform game engine, NAPA can be ported into a mobile application that can be utilized as a star map allowing most of the software architectures to be reused.

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