Dalai Felinto, Mike Pan and Martins Upitis use Blender in a real-time setup with sub-atomic particle detectors and a full-dome projector. You can see their work at the Cosmic Sensations event in Nijmegen, the Netherlands from Sept 30 - Oct 2, and they're giving away free tickets!

(By the way: it was good to meet you last night guys, I hope to see you again at the BConf 2010!)

Dalai Felinto writes:

Hello BlenderNation,

we are here to present the current Blender Game Engine project we are working on and to invite interested artists to see it live. Attend the Cosmic Sensation event that happens from September 30th to October 2nd in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. For more information please visit: www.cosmicsensation.nl. The tickets are pretty affordable, nevertheless we will be giving away 27 tickets for the first blender heads who contact us into the email [email protected]

Our team is an international join force between artists, technical artists and coders. The project started one year ago with the architect Dalai Felinto (dfelinto - Brazil). During this course of time a lot of effort was put into making sure Blender 2.5 had a Blender Game Engine up and running. In the Open Software world that translates to a lot of committed code and reported bugs. With the bases covered, the digital artist Mike Pan (mpan3 - Canada) and Martins Upitis (martinsh - Latvia) joined the project for an one intensive month of creative work.

The project is called Cosmic Sensation. It's held by the high-energy physics experimental department in the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Led by the professor Sijbrand de Jong, their research discovered new ways to detect sub-atomic particles, in particular one of high energy frequency known as Muon. Given its characteristics, Muons don't have its trajectory affected after its separation from the Proton nuclei. Therefore being able to detect Muons and to trace their directions can lead to important studies on the origin of the protons emitions and their direction. The original study was published in the Science magazine. However the scientist team wanted to reach a larger audience. Therefore they came up with the idea of the Cosmic Sensation event.

For three nights the largest immersive fulldome in the world will be the stage for Cosmic Sensation. This event is a blend of dancing, music and visuals in a way never seen before. Real particle sensors, installed onto the 30 meter dome structure, will trigger music and visual effects whenever a new cosmic ray hits the dome. This realtime feed of events not only produce procedural music (superimposed at the DJs work) but is also responsible to feed an interactive digital visualization projected inside the dome. As you could have guessed, Blender Game Engine is the technology behind that part.

We don't want to spoil the surprise, but the Blender visualization is an artistic interpretation of the particles movement along the dome with fancy visual effects. We are using the whole dome as a canvas for digital projection, receiving the realtime data from the sensors (through OSC), and using the fulldome/fisheye mode (slightly patched) to project into the correct stitching.

For those unable to attend the main event and interested to hear more about this project we are going to talk about it in the Blender Conference 2010. For in November, passed the presentation, we will be releasing the files in a CC license and photos and footages from the project. Stay tuned!

Related Links:

* News about the project and more inside informations on the team blog's.