Interactive Northern Lights
Showing the invisible
The purpose of this project is to show an invisible phenomena and making it understandable through interaction. We wanted to visualize the Earth's magnetic field one of its most well known byproducts - the Northen Lights.
What causes the Northern Lights?
The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, is not invisible but the phenomena causing it is. When the sun is burning, it’s not only sending sunlight towards earth but also clouds of charged particles - so-called “Solar Winds”. What protects us is the earth’s magnetic field - the same field that makes the compass arrow point north. The magnetic field deflects most of the dangerous particles. However, some of them sneak through at the points where the magnetic field starts and ends – earth’s north and south poles. When the solar wind particles reach Earth, they collide with gasses in the atmosphere and small bursts of light are created. Millions of these light bursts make up the Northern lights.
What the visitors do
Stand with their feet on the sun
Use their hands to send solar winds to Earth
Watch how the northern lights appear in the sky
Demo
How it works
Theremine
A theremine was built in order to create an electro magnetic field to simulate the magnetic field around the Earth.
Arduino
An arduino was used to parse the frequency from the theremine circuit and transmit it to the computer.
WebGL
WebGL is a web-based graphics library that was used to render the northern lights effect in real time.
NodeJS
NodeJS is a javascript runtime environment used to parse data from the Arduino and handle communication to the visualization
Team
Robin Edquist
robined@student.chalmers.se
Oscar Fredriksson
froscar@student.chalmers.se
Johan Hansson
johha@student.chalmers.se
Elias Lind
eliaslind91@gmail.com
Karl Ängermark
kalle@angermark.se
Interaction Design Project 2019 - Group 7