Speaker: Florian Schaukowitsch (ICGA)
The open-source, cross-platform planetarium application Stellarium (http://www.stellarium.org) is widely popular because of its rendering quality, astronomical precision and easy-to-use interface. Its functionality can be extended through scripts and a modular plugin system. A recent addition were georeferenced three-dimensional surface models that are freely examinable by the user. This makes Stellarium especially interesting to the field of archaeoastronomy.
To enable Stellarium to be used in larger installations, such as a surround panorama installation for an exhibition, we propose adding a distributed rendering system. This allows for the rendering and display of different viewports of the same scene, and can share the rendering burden on a small network of low-cost devices. Synchronization of display state and inputs must happen over the network, using a client/server system. Existing approaches will also be evaluated. Additionally, we build a separate interface with HTML/JavaScript, allowing to control a running Stellarium instance through an API provided by a HTTP server plugin.