Bubble Telescope


About the Project

Bubble telescope was the design project of New Media Designer Sujith Kumar. The telescope comprised of two components: the physical structure of the telescope and the tablet which essentially displays the view of the solar system to the user. My role in the project was to develop the Unity application and design the interactions that the tablet ran inside the telescope.

Project Experience

I had a lot of fun while making this project with Sujith, we explored a lot of ideas and also learned quite a number of things during the making. I came into the lifespan of this project when the idea of viewing an imagined cosmos via a telescope was already established. Sujith explored a lot of ideas, forms and narratives before that.

The Idea

The core idea was to incorporate multiple narratives related to space whether they are from a scientific gained knowledge, reigious, cultural, philosophical, futuristic sci-fi, imagined or other theme showing that all these narratives co-exist between us.

The Process

In our first approach we wanted to have the scale of the solar system as close as possible to that of the real one. But since the planet sizes become tiny when compared to inter-planetary distances, this method was bound to fail with the required form of interaction.

In our next approach we brought planets closer and scaled them so that they were easily seen. Though this made the solar system ‘not for scale’, but it was now much easier to navigate in the space. For interacting, user has to come in front of the telescope and view hrough the eye-piece. The telescope was mounted on a stand to give it freedom to rotate in 2 axes: yaw and pitch. Thus by viewing through the telescope from different angles allows user to view and focus on any heavenly body. This was done by reading the gyroscope values inside unity.

First slide
Second slide
Third slide
Fourth slide
Fifth slide
Sixth slide
Seventh slide

For this project we ended up finishing two narratives one for the sun and other for the moon. When user gazes upon any of them long enough, it triggers there narratives.

Sun's Narrative


Moon's Narrative

Some essential learnings from the project

  • Playing transparent videos within Unity (5.6 and above) using Unity’s in-built video player.

  • Using ffmpeg to convert a ‘with alpha’ video into webm format with VP8 encoding, which is required to play these transparent videos. Know more at https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/settings-for-importing-a-video-with-an-alpha-channel.457657/

  • Getting the render from more than 1 camera at the same time, we used one to play videos (video played on their far clipping plane) and other as the main camera.