Visitors captain new show at planetarium

Ever want to be like Ensign Sulu, piloting a starship through space? Or would you prefer to be Captain Kirk, giving him the orders? Now visitors to the Hokulani Imaginarium can do either.

Thanks to an upgrade in the Windward Community College planetarium, a new production lets an individual audience member take control of the image, creating the impression that he or she is steering a starship through space. And the rest of the audience gets to tell the pilot where to go.

It’s all part of “Voyages of the Starship Discovery,” a new interactive show that premieres Friday to the general public. The show takes advantage of an enhanced interactivity feature, controlled by push buttons on the arm of each chair, that enables visitors to choose their own adventure through space.

“The buttons allow the audience to select how the show is going,” said Joe Ciotti, a math and science professor at Windward who designed the Imaginarium and heads up Windward’s Center for Aerospace Education. “The show is not the same every time you go inside. The show takes different branches depending on the mood of the audience.”

The technology works in two ways. Throughout the 35-minute show, the audience will be presented with a number of options — for example, which planet to go to and what kind of task needs to be done there. The audience will vote on which choice, with the majority ruling.

“Let’s say we make a visit to a space station someplace, where we need to fix a robotic arm,” said Larry Wiss, manager of the Imaginarium. “Press your button if you want to be a crew member helping to fix this arm. Everybody votes on whether to position the arm in the right position or the wrong position.”

Another feature allows an individual audience member to control the image projected on the dome, creating the impression that he or she is piloting a spacecraft through a star field.

The buttons are “just like the joystick in a video game,” Ciotti said. “You actually move the image around at will, the way you want to.”

During the 35-minute show, the computer will select up to eight people to be pilot. Early reviews suggest that pilots will be under a lot of pressure, electronic voting or no.

“We were watching a third-grade class test it out for us,” Ciotti said. “It’s amazing how the kids were becoming interactive with the kid who was pressing the buttons. They were yelling, ‘Move, move, move! No, up, up up!’ They were just getting so excited about the fact that they were moving the star field themselves.”

“Voyages of the Starship Discovery” will be the first time that the Imaginarium uses its newest technology. The facility officially opened in 2001 with the push-button voting technology, but it only allowed the audience to choose from different slideshows to be projected onto the dome. The system was upgraded in 2012 to give viewers more control over the projected image, but technological difficulties kept it offline for a time.

Ciotti also wanted a suitable show to debut the new system. “We were waiting for a show like this to come along, and this show just recently became available to us,” Ciotti said.

The Imaginarium also will offer several other shows this spring, including one set to the music of Led Zeppelin and another about Mauna Kea. An especially popular show is “Stargazing,” on the second Wednesday of each month, where viewers are given a guided tour to the night skies of that month.

Of course, there’s nothing like a planetarium show, where viewers are encircled by an image that roughly parallels being outside under the night sky. It might even be better than what Sulu and Kirk experienced.

“You’re literally embedded inside the video image,” Ciotti said.

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CORRECTION: The Flying Monster and Voyage of Starship Discovery shows premiere Friday. An earlier version of this story and the story in Thursday’s Today section said the shows premiere Saturday.