Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience

Synopsis

We have always looked up. Smithsonian Starstruck steps inside that ancient cinema and dissolves the screen. A free-roam virtual reality work created in partnership with the Smithsonian and built on data from NASA, ESA, Hubble, JWST, Chandra, and the Parker Solar Probe, Starstruck rebuilds the most iconic two-dimensional images in human history as walkable, to-scale universes. What was once a famous photograph becomes a place audiences can inhabit, touch, and traverse. This is not a film about the cosmos. It is an invitation to step inside it. Visitors stand within the Pillars of Creation as a star is born, witness Betelgeuse detonate as a supernova, and feel spacetime warp around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. They step aboard recreations of the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory — and look ahead to the Giant Magellan Telescope, rising in Chile’s Atacama Desert, poised to search for habitable worlds beyond our solar system. Starstruck is a poem about what we are. Billions of years of stars living, dying, and recycling their matter gave rise to a small, green-blue world — a fragile miracle against impossible odds. The carbon in our hands, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones were forged in supernovae. “We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” (Carl Sagan) To walk these scales is to feel what astronauts call the overview effect — Earth as one borderless whole, and humanity as a single, fragile experiment.

Statement

We didn’t make a film about wonder. We made a place built from hard science: real data, real telescopes, real physics. Because space isn’t mysterious. It’s a real place with a real address. And when people feel that from the inside, they begin to understand that the universe isn’t chaos — it’s organised, synchronised, governed by laws that made us. The more we understand the cosmos, the more we understand ourselves.

Videos

• Smithsonian Starstruck - Overhead4D Making-ofMaking-of · Overhead4D
• Behind the Scenes of Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive ExperienceMaking-of · Overhead4D
• Starstruck in Washington DC: a five-minute documentaryMaking-of · Smithsonian Starstruck

More online

• Smithsonian Starstruck: official site · Smithsonian Starstruck

Credits

Director

James Elliott Mizroch

Production

Smithsonian (Denise Elliott, Nicki Marko), Overhead 4D (Tomáš Barnáš), Fever (James Elliott Mizroch)

Running Time

38'

Language

English

Country

USA

Main Cast

James Seawood

Screenplay

Delaney Kentzell, Matthias McCoy-Thompson, James Elliott Mizroch

Music

Adam Kordos

Sound

Adam Kordos

A project conceived and realised by

Tomáš Barnáš, Denise Elliott, Nicki Marko, Elizabeth Bakacs, Michael Sheridan, Dr. Randall Smith, Dr. Laura Brenneman

Art director

James Elliott Mizroch

Lead developer

Tomáš Barnáš

Developers

Peter Marcinov, Tamas Lorincz, Marek Truchly

Lead designer

Tomas Danay

Designers

Roman Danko, Jan Konecny, Matus Vacula, Stefania Haisakova, Martin Miec

Artists

Gregor Grega, Emik Hirschner, Kristina Bajanikova, Ivan Kovacs

Technical team

Dominik Prokop, TJ Hendricks