For three months in 1997, Cognetics Corporation Senior Designer, Paul S. Hoffman, volunteered as the Art Director for a multi-media space journey through the solar system. This unique project for the Kerry County Museum in Tralee, Ireland, was built entirely by volunteers working through the Internet.

The project began with a request from John Griffin of the Kerry County Museum. His email was directed to Silicon Graphics, Incorporated (SGI), one of the companies most heavily involved in Virtual Reality technology on the Internet. The museum was planning an exhibit on space exploration, featuring materials borrowed from both NASA and the European Space Agency. They were interested in providing a multi-media experience for the school children who would be visiting this exhibit, Ireland’s first ever on space travel. Mr. Griffin’s first request was whether there was already in existence a virtual reality tour of the solar system. He explained that the museum did not have the funds to contract the production of a new computer project.

The request was posted to a mailing list on the Internet which focuses on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), the still-evolving Internet standard for 3-dimensional graphics. Len Bullard, a VRML enthusiast and pioneer from Huntsville, Alabama (the original home of the American space program), picked up the ball and said, in effect, "this sounds like fun - anybody want to join in and do this for the kids of Ireland?" Ultimately, there were about a dozen people who joined in to create computer models of planets, satellites, spacecraft, and extra-terrestrial colonies. It was truly an international project, with contributions from individuals from around the globe, including Australia, Alaska, Sweden, and France.

Ultimately, the idea came to model the space trip on the emigrations which took place during the Irish potato famine in the 19th Century. The Voyage of the Jeanie Johnston II takes place in the middle of the next century. Famine and sickness have blanketed the globe in the wake of an asteroid strike. People are emigrating to colonies on the moon and Mars. As we head out on a colony ship, we learn of emergency conditions at a mining outpost on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Ultimately we visit each of the planets of the solar system in what is essentially a humanitarian effort to save and preserve life.

Len Bullard acted as primary coordinator of the project, and took on scripting the dialog and narration which was ultimately recorded by actors in Ireland. He also headed up the other significant aspect of the audio portion, background music. Len’s band , Ground Level Sound, performed most of the music heard in the program, much of it composed or arranged by Len.

The computer program runs in a Web Browser, using the CosmoPlayer VRML plugin. The team worked hard to create a seamless integration between text-based HTML interface elements (buttons and links) and the 3-dimensional VRML graphics. Not only did Paul coordinate the artistic effort of the various world-builders and modelers, but he also designed and programmed the final interface, as well as creating the majority of the planet and satellite models. He estimates that he devoted more than 300 hours total to the project.

The final, unified program represents a real breakthrough in working with this fledgling technology. This is the first program of its size and scope to make use of VRML this extensively. [And six years later, it has not been equalled or surpassed.] Also, the project broke new ground in cooperative work; it was done completely by volunteers who never met each other, who cooperated well with little or no rancor; and it was delivered on time, taking only 3 months from start to finish.

Both Len and Paul managed to go to Tralee for the opening of the exhibit on April 18, 1997. They were glad they had decided to do so, since they ended up having to spend almost 30 hours straight doing final integration of the audio with the graphics. The computers, donated by Compaq, were being installed just minutes before a crowd of children were ushered in accompanying the official host for the opening, American astronaut and the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

Click on any image to see a full-screen JPEG version in a new window. These images are large - 200-300K each.

For more information about this project, please visit the Irish Space Web site.