Shira Dome Console 3.0

Shira Dome Console brings the OpenSpace space visualisation engine and Shira Presenter's fulldome playback together in one program for fixed planetariums. Version 3.0 is the largest step the console has taken. The engine moves to OpenSpace 0.22.0 and the player to Shira Presenter 2.6; the console becomes a full participant in Content Producer; the script box becomes a scripting environment that writes scripts for you; the sky effects that made Shira Universe recognisable arrive inside the rendering engine itself; and licensed sky imagery is now never written to disk at all.

What is in the package

• OpenSpace version 0.22.0, under the MIT licence, with Shira's own engine patches
• Shira Presenter version 2.6
• Fourteen ready-made mission profiles
• Turkish, English and Chinese interface, on the desktop and on the web remote
• Earth 3D Clouds and Volumetric Aurora

Script Manager

What used to be a plain text box is now a working scripting environment, built on the engine's own Lua.

• Completion as you type, with signatures and inline documentation taken from the engine's live command list. The help can never fall out of step with the build it ships in.
• Scripts written by flying. Press Record, fly the dome the way you want it, and stop. What you did comes back as a readable script: camera movement becomes flights, and the panel switches you toggled are captured with it.
• Recorded camera paths replay smoothly, and in the direction they were flown.
• Finished scripts can be dropped into a Shira Presenter show and run as part of the sequence.

Inside Content Producer

The console is now a full participant in Shira Presenter's show editor, rather than a program running beside it.

• A frame remembers the console. A snapshot on the timeline stores where the camera is and what it is anchored to, the simulation time, the display options, the constellation art and the whole annotation layer — and puts them back when the show reaches that frame.
• Frames blend, they do not cut. Moving from one frame to the next, the console travels and fades into the new state, so a built show reads as one continuous flight.
• Scripts are timeline content. A script written in Script Manager is dropped onto the timeline like any other item and runs as part of the sequence.
• The show is driven from the tablet as well as from the console's own controls.

Profiles and missions

Fourteen mission profiles ship with 3.0, three of them new in this version:

• Artemis — the Orion capsules of Artemis I and Artemis II
• BepiColombo — the joint ESA and JAXA mission to Mercury
• Euclid — ESA's dark Universe telescope, in its halo orbit around the Sun–Earth L2 point

A mission is enabled with a tick. Its assets, actions and properties are written into the console's profile and are ready the next time the program starts.

Sky Manager

The sky effects that made Shira Universe recognisable are on the dome console in 3.0, and they are provided at engine level — render passes and shader work inside OpenSpace itself, not a picture laid over the top. They composite with the star field, keep their depth against the scene, and hold their shape under fulldome projection.

• Annotations — text, image and line annotations locked to the celestial sphere, drawn as a layer of their own so that star twinkling is left untouched, and stored with the snapshot.

• Telescope — a magnified view of the chosen target, drawn as its own render pass with its own field of view. Pick a moon, a spacecraft or a deep-sky object out of the scene: the view travels to it and fades in rather than cutting, and a marker shows where on the sky it sits.

A telescope view of the August 11, 1999 solar eclipse.

Observing the shadow cast by a solar eclipse on Earth from the Moon.

• Meteor showers — up to three showers in the sky at once, each with its own radiant, hourly rate and colour. Meteors stream from the radiant you place, and the radiant itself can be marked and named on the dome. Meteor showers stream from the radiant you place on the dome, at the hourly rate you set.

Meteor shower settings

• Star twinkle — atmospheric scintillation across the star field, with adjustable strength, computed in the star shader. Only the stars actually seen through the atmosphere twinkle, and the effect stops once you leave it behind.

• Aurora borealis and australis — polar light with real depth. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is added to the scene: the curtains are generated in the shader and marched through as a volume, so they hang overhead as you stand under them and read as a ring around the pole as you pull away from the planet. Standing on Earth they appear where they belong, between 55° and 75° of latitude with the Sun below the horizon, and brighten as the Sun sinks. Southern lights are drawn as readily as northern ones. See Earth, close up below.

Aurora Borealis Simulation

• Volumetric models — catalogued nebula and galaxy models. Showing a volume hides that object's flat photograph automatically, and switching between models no longer stutters.

Volumetric Models Simulation

• Virtual compass — eight direction marks, their colour and size changed on the spot, named in the interface language.

• Horizon reference circles appear only when the camera is landed, where they mean something.

Earth, close up

Three layers are worked out around the Earth while each frame is drawn — its atmosphere, clouds with real thickness, and the aurora. Each has a settings window of its own on the Sky Manager, each is saved with the show, and none of them needs anything downloaded. They are yours to compose: a scattered fair-weather sky over a coastline, an overcast deck seen from the summit above it, an auroral oval drawn around the pole as the camera leaves the planet behind.

• Atmosphere — the height of the air, the strength of the Sun, how the blue and the haze thin out with altitude, how much light the ground gives back, and the range of Sun heights over which day is handed to night. Every value is a slider, and the whole window returns to its defaults on one confirmation.

• 3D Clouds — cloud shapes made inside the plug-in, with nothing downloaded for them. The deck follows the shape of the planet, so a base set at two kilometres is two kilometres at the pole as well as at the equator: fly down to a mountain summit and the clouds are below you, where they should be. Set cover, altitude, thickness, density, detail, wind speed and wind direction, or start from one of six named types — stratus, cumulus, stratocumulus, nimbostratus, altocumulus, altostratus. Aerial haze puts real distance between the observer and the far edge of the deck. And with one switch the generated cover can be made to follow the shape of the real cloud cover of the day, so what is on the dome is the weather that is actually outside.

A telescope view of the August 11, 1999 solar eclipse.

• Aurora — the size, thickness and midnight reach of the oval, how broken up it is, the height band the curtains fill, the colour at their feet and at their tops, and how fast the whole display drifts. Two ready-made states, quiet and active, are one click apart.
• The imagery keeps up — the daily satellite picture of the Earth is published orbit by orbit, so the current day is only ever half finished. The console now asks for the last completed day, and the globe is whole.
• Terrain that stays — map tiles fetched once are kept on the disk between sessions. A landscape that has been visited before opens without being downloaded again.

Content protection

Licensed sky imagery and Shira content definition files are never written to disk at any stage. Content is opened in memory only for as long as it is on the dome, and leaves no copyable form behind it.

• The plugin interface has a language of its own, which the web remote follows.
• Satellite data refresh frequency is set once, rather than on some forty separate data sources.
• Drag a target out of the list and onto the preview window to travel to it.
• A licence manager with network registration; everything other than the licence itself now lives in the console's own settings file.

Web remote control

• The connection fault is fixed — the page no longer sits waiting on "Connecting…".
• Every component loads locally. The dome computer needs no internet access for the remote to work.
• Turkish and Chinese interface alongside English.
• Buttons show the true state of the setting they control.
• New sections: Display Options, the landing controls, the Space Stations, InterStellar, Comets and Asteroids panels, Basic Target, Data2Dome and Produced Content.
• Content preview images, joystick control and the tab layout were all reworked.