National Space Centre - Leicester

Recently a course trip to the National Space Centre in Leicester was organised, it was a good oppurtunity to observe multimedia exhibitions working and to see how people interact with them.

There were many different kinds of multimedia on display but the common denominator was that it was all interactive in some way. Whether it be as simple as pressing a button for an informative video to play or as complicated as a device telling you how scared you are of certain images by you placing your hand on a sensory pad, you could interact with pretty much everything in the centre.

The main attraction at the centre is a 360 degree cinema which shows 3d animated movies, this is an extremely impressive feature and at times the 360 degree environment can you make you feel as if you are actually staring right into space or looking back at the earth. I enjoyed this very much and would recommend anyone to go and see it, not only is it really cool i actually learned quite a bit too about a fascinating subject that is space and the universe.

An interactive display that i liked was one where you had to put your hand on a sensor pad and then look at a series of images. Once you had looked at all the photos it gave you results and told you which image you reacted to most strongly. I thought this was quite interesting and used a nice mixture of technology and human interaction.







Now moving on to a display that i disliked, this was a game where you looked into a webcam which took your photo then imported it onto the screen in front of you. After pressing a series of seemingly meaningless buttons you were sposed to be transformed into an alien, but when that happened it didnt appear to have any relation to original photo. Basically it just stuck a random comptuer generated head of an alien where my picture had been, i thought this was poor and i went away feeling that it was a poor display that i wasted my time on, it tried to be too complicated and just generally didnt work.

So that concludes my feelings on the space centre trip, an interesting day out. If i'm being honest i didnt learn that much about Multimedia but i did learn some fascinating facts about the universe.

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker