Jamming with the Stars: Ruth West on Designing VR for Everyone in the Room

What happens to a virtual reality experience when you step back and ask: what does it look like from the outside?

Ruth West, transdisciplinary researcher and director of the xREZ Art + Science Lab at the University of North Texas, visited Siebel Center for Design from April 28 - May 5, 2026 to explore this question through her ongoing project INSTRUMENT | One Antarctic Night, an interactive multiplayer VR installation that transforms astronomical data into a collaborative performance of light and sound.

West opened by naming a paradox at the heart of her work: big data is a proxy for reality that simultaneously reveals and conceals it. Rather than treat this as a limitation, she leans into it. Her practice, which she calls "DataRemix", uses scientific tools for aesthetic purposes, moving through data to generate meaning rather than confirm it. "How do we look for what we don't know we're looking for?" she asked the audience.

The Data Behind the Experience

INSTRUMENT | One Antarctic Night begins with a genuinely extraordinary dataset. The installation was built from starlight captured by AST3 robotic telescopes at Dome A, Antarctica, operated by astrophysicist Lifan Wang and an international research team studying exoplanets, variable stars, and dark matter. Because of Antarctica's geography, one polar night lasts four months, giving the telescopes an uninterrupted window into the sky.

That light had been traveling for 160,000 years before it reached those telescopes. West's team transformed it into:

• Over 758 million magnitude readings
• Data from 817,373 individual stars
• Never-before-seen observational data from the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud

Processing the raw dataset meant cross-referencing it against tools like Astropy, SIMBAD, and GAIA to annotate and make sense of deeply irregular, large-scale, and varied material.

VR as a Shared Performance

Inside the installation, players have no bodies. Instead, each participant appears as a colored trail of light moving through the starfield. Different arm movements generate percussive sounds, and multiple players together compose a live, collaborative soundscape. West drew a deliberate parallel to percussion as a communal instrument: something that has always brought people into rhythm together.

The technical infrastructure behind the experience includes data-driven multiplayer procedural graphics, ambisonic audio, GPU-accelerated machine learning, high-resolution displays, and real-time precision tracking across players.

But the design challenge West found most compelling was not what happens inside the headset. It was what happens to everyone else in the room.

Designing for the Whole Room

VR in public spaces often creates a disorienting, exclusionary dynamic: a few people in headsets, surrounded by bystanders who have no point of entry into the experience. Rather than design around this tension, West made it the central design problem.

She developed five principles to guide INSTRUMENT | One Antarctic Night as a public installation:

• Social acceptability: creating an experience that feels safe and open to everyone present, not just headset wearers
• Observer vs. performer: revealing effects and movements to generate a genuine spectator experience, not just waiting-room awkwardness
• Transparency: visibly connecting the physical and virtual worlds so the work is legible from outside
• Spatial configuration: a reconfigurable, free-form "VR-in-the-round" arena that makes the room itself part of the piece
• Progressive engagement: a continuum from ambient awareness to full immersion, with every level valued

The result is a framework West calls graduated engagement: passersby, spectators, active participants, and remote visitors each occupy a distinct but connected relationship to the work. As immersive technologies become more present in public life, she argues, this continuum offers a model for designing experiences that belong to everyone in the space.

After the Talk

Following the lecture, attendees experienced the installation firsthand in SCD's Moonlight Bay during a reception that ran until 7pm. INSTRUMENT | One Antarctic Night is a collaboration between interactive artists, composers, computer scientists, and astrophysics experts. Learn more at oneantarcticnight.com.