News:

It’s been nearly a year since PeanutSoft released PlanetVRium: The Virtual Reality Planetarium.  We are excited for the results we’ve had so far; junior astronomers from all over the world have experienced PlanetVRium.  We are continuing to work on the next version.  Recently we made great progress in migrating our VR toolkits , but this has split our focus between creating new content and opening a new hardware market, and trying to do both.  So stay tuned!  We’re almost there.

Thanks so much to everyone who has supported us so far!  We hope you are finding PlanetVRium as exciting as we do.  And, we would love to hear from you, please provide comments on our Product Page and Community Forum.

PlanetVRium is available today, just click above!  What is PlanetVRium?  It’s an interactive planetarium experience in Virtual Reality.  In fact I’d like to say it is THE Virtual Reality Planetarium.  You control the stars.  See and move them all around you.  Turn the lines and names of the constellations on and off.  View dozens of galaxies and nebulae.  It’s all at your control.  And there are several different Visual Experiences: 3D “movies” which describe various topics about the universe around us.  For example, a 3D visualization of the difference in the sizes of the planets and sun compared to Earth scaled to the size of a soccer ball, as seen below.  And new Visual Experiences are coming soon, in the next release.

If Earth were scaled to the size of a soccer ball, it would still be 2.5km away from the Sun, a huge 25m sphere

Control the Stars

See the stars, including extra colored dots indicating where galaxies (green) and nebulae (pink) are relative to other stars in the sky nearby.  Turn on/off the lines of the constellations, with or without the names displayed.  Note the location of the constellation Orion in both screenshots, below:
A view of the night sky, with constellations disabled
The same image as the left, with constellations (lines and names) enabled

Also at your control is a simple filter (below) which limits the stars to only the brightest magnitudes.  For example there are 8404 stars at magnitude 6.5 and brighter, but only 93 stars in the sky when filtered to those with magnitude 2.5 and brighter.  And with this filter you can see how the constellation Orion has so many bright stars in it, which is why it is so recognizable in the night sky.

There are 8404 stars with magnitude 6.5 and brighter.
But only 93 stars brighter than 2.5 magnitude
The Orion Nebula, visible in Orion’s dagger

Select a star in the sky to see information about that star such as name, magnitude and distance in light years.  Selecting the green and pink dots shows beautiful pictures of galaxies and nebulae on a huge screen in front of you.

Or, you can rotate the sky based on latitude and time.  I say “time” because the mathematics to determine each star’s position in the sky involves more than just longitude.  It is also time of year and day,  The time of year indicates the Earth’s location in its path around the Sun.  And this affects which stars are visible in a specific direction based time of day and whether it happens to be day or night time for that specific time, in reality.  That is, every star that we see in our night sky would be visible all around us, all the time, if there weren’t objects blocking our view.  Objects like the Earth.  And the Sun.  They really affect our ability to see all the stars.  But not in VR!

Rotating the sky based on latitude. You can see 40 degrees north is appropriate for Denver, Madrid or Beijing

Visual Experiences

As if the ability to control the universe wasn’t enough, PlanetVRium also includes many Visual Experiences:  3D movies projected all around you, in VR.  Each describing interesting topics about the solar system or the universe.  And coming soon, a new Visual Experience which has an interesting interpretation for explaining the concept of gravity to everyone who has VR.  But in the current version, there are still many Visual Experiences to choose from.  The Earth scaled to soccer ball size, as mentioned above.  Or explaining how the orbits and rotation of each of the planets affects the length of times for their day and year.

Several to choose from.  More to come.  Watch them again and again and learn something new!  

Visual Experiences are what make PlanetVRium unique.  Visualizing and explaining scientific aspects about the universe, before your eyes.  You can’t get that on a cellphone app.

The length of a “year”, or one complete trip around the Sun, differs for each planet. Also the speed of rotation of each planet around its axis, defines the length of a “day” for that planet.