Rediscovering Korea's Ancient Skies: An Immersive, Interactive 3D Map of Traditional Korean Constellations in the Milky Way
This work addresses the need for immersive cultural heritage visualization for enthusiasts and educators, though it is incremental as it applies existing 3D mapping techniques to a specific dataset.
The researchers tackled the problem of visualizing Korea's traditional constellations by creating an interactive 3D star map of the Milky Way, enabling users to experience and interact with these constellations in 3D space to appreciate their cultural significance.
In this work, we visualized Korea's traditional constellations within an interactive 3D star map we created of the Milky Way. Unlike virtual planetariums based on celestial star coordinates from Earth's viewpoint, our visualization enables people to experience and interact with Korean constellation forms and its constituent stars in 3D space, and appreciate their historical, cultural significance from a contemporary perspective. Our interactive constellation map is based on the most detailed and accurate information on the stars in our Galaxy to date, and combines our expanding scientific understanding of the stars with contextual information reflecting Korea's unique astronomical culture and heritage.