Last year, our friends at Clark Planetarium approached us to create a unique experience combining our ultrawide Pano Dual 49” and their enchanting Stellar Playground. 

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This innovative interactive exhibit invites players to create their own solar systems from a palette of suns and planets, using the sprawling multitouch display for live and lively gameplay. Players use the intuitive drag-and-drop-and-fling interface to populate space with celestial bodies, each of which then behaves according to its gravitational relationship with all surrounding bodies, including those added by other players. 

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With time sped up, and with the app's robust physics engine under the hood, the tension from all that mass can add up fast. Working together, users can create a whole spectrum of worlds — solar systems like ours, galaxies, binary star systems, intergalactic planetary peregrinations, and (of course) outright chaos — all the while learning about gravity, stellar evolution, planet habitability, and the inevitable interconnectedness of all matter and energy. 

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Which reminds me of our staff-favorite strategy, at least on Mondays: feeding the universe, Katamari Damacy-style, into an all-consuming black hole. Check out the quick video:

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You thought we were kidding about the black hole.

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Sure, it's educational. But it's also infinite fun! 

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Stellar Playground makes an attractive exhibit on all sizes of Ideum touch tables. But with controls for up to ten players on the ultrawide multitouch Pano Dual 49”, the playspace is vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big. 

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It's a match made in the heavens.

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Stellar Playground is a shining example of the wide variety of software designed to work seamlessly with Ideum touch tables, including more of Clark Planetarium's suite of interactive exhibits. Visit Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City, or you can find them at ASTC's 2023 conference, October 7–10, 2023, in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

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You can also find Stellar Playground at Frost Science in Miami or the Versant Power Astronomy Center in Maine. For more information about how Ideum products can support and enhance a whole world of exhibits, contact the Ideum sales team.

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