LIGHTHOUSEAND HOLMAN PRIZE 2019 PRESENT
astro hunters
The interactive journey of one blind adventurer, seeking to understand the stars and humanity’s relationship to the sky.
Starting from Australia, Yuma and guide dog Wilson will cross the world, trekking and camping across Australia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
They’ll investigate the stories of stars across different cultures to learn how the night sky has driven inspiration and innovation in our everyday lives, and meet with experts in astrophysics, cosmology,Egyptology,bioscieneand satellite and spacecraft navigation. They’ll get up close with terrestrial and orbital telescopes, meeting the engineers who operate them, the scientists who make their data intelligible, and the physicists using that information to understand the fundamental nature of our universe.
The video and audio captured at each stop will be presented through an interactive series of live-streams and podcasts. Each podcast episode begins with a briefing room segment as if the exoplanet hunting satellite.
The listener is departing for a space mission and culminates in an interactive Q&A session with the expert. The topics will reflect a gap in accessibility for blind children and scientists and the need for tools to be made accessible with sound and tactile dimensions. As a software engineer, Yuma will design new features and tools for testing and critique by the guest experts. These will then be added to the companion app, AstreOS, for everyone to try, discover and enjoy after each episode.
ASTRO HUNTERS is an all ages, all skill level adventure where anyone can tune in to watch and listen to live feeds from the team, as they tackle deserts, set up camp on top of cliffs or in forested mountain ranges, and navigate unfamiliar urban landscapes, all captured with 3D binaural audio recordings, to ensure the listener experiences total immersion.
making the universe accessible to all
AstreOS is the result of a conversation in a garage turned workshop between two engineer friends.
The app won the 2018 NASA Space App Challenge, has over 1800 beta testers around the globe, and has appeared in multiple physics and science magazines.
project aims to extend the app into a complete, dynamically AstreOS aims to be the most comprehensive, beautiful, and especially:
The most accessible space app in the world.
exoplanet hunting feature is the latest test bed for implementing a multi-dimensional analysis tool for both sighted and blind users alike. AstreOS gives not only visual, but also audio and tactile analysis interfaces for all cosmic phenomenon, allowing the world’s population of 285 million visually impaired individuals access to a fascinating and historically significant activity others may take for granted: stargazing. With the EXONOS feature, we aim to achieve the unimaginable: for blind citizen scientists to discover new exoplanets among the hundreds of thousands of candidate star systems currently being observed by the TESS spacecraft.
