Space Scrim is a vision for a site-specific planetarium of the future located in the Water Street Tampa community. We conceived of Space Scrim as an inside-out planetarium, a tool to engage the public with time, place, and space from the street to the galaxy and beyond.

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Our proposal inverts the traditional planetarium by proposing an interactive 3-dimensional billboard with a scrim that serves as an information interface to signal our relative position in space. The installation can project information onto the scrim, the ground plane, and buildings beyond, highlighting key site lines and view corridors that enable participants to visualize where they are in the world. These sight lines showcase celestial alignments of interest such as Polaris (the North Star), equinoxes, solstices, and the cardinal directions. One specific site line looking down Channelside Drive could allow for augmented reality views of rocket launches from the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the other side of the state.

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In addition to walking through, around and beneath the Space Scrim, participants can congregate on benches in the surrounding plaza to observe the Scrim and experience its multi-media displays. Pedestrians traversing the city streets could look up at the Space Scrim and track the position of celestial bodies or objects in space such as the International Space Station or the Hubble Space Telescope, watching their movements telegraphed onto the scrim’s skin in head’s-up display fashion.

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Space Scrim reimagines the traditional planetarium building as an interactive urban element with a small physical footprint, but a large visual impact, engaging the public to wonder, to comprehend and to appreciate our place in the universe.