OH Space is a collaborative project of a group of creatives that gathered at Springfest, Las Vegas to produce a livestream of a rocket launch. The idea started from Office Hours, a global community of over 5,000 media and event professionals that meet online every day to learn from each other, work with each other, and forge a new path for their industries.
SPX was invited to provide graphic design and live graphics implementation for the project. Tuomo Kulomaa, the founder of SPX, travelled to Nevada desert to take on the role of Graphics Producer for the livestream.
A comprehensive 4K graphics package was designed and created for the project, including a social media integration, name templates, end credits and infographics connected to real-time telemetry data from the rocket.
Realtime telemetry graphics
An on-board computer in the rocket was connected via RF radio link to a base computer on the ground, which parsed incoming telemetry data and passed the data to the SPX software via an API interface which updated the on-air graphics automatically.
The complexity of this project was quite high, because it had never been done before. The on-board computer for the rocket was built, but it could never be tested before the launch - so only simulations were possible beforehand. In order to do that, the telemetry graphics were tested by sending imaginary data to the SPX system to see the behavior of the live graphics in action. Of course it is always well recommended to do as much end-to-end testing as possible to avoid hick-ups in the execution of complex projects similar to these. In this case it was not an option and there were issues in the pipeline - but the launch was a huge success nevertheless!
Behind the scenes
See the OH-Space Graphics Breakdown episode of Office Hours for a deep dive in to this project and it's learnings.
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