Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience

We have always looked up. Smithsonian Starstruck steps inside that ancient cinema and dissolves the screen. A free-roam virtual reality work created in partnership with the Smithsonian and built on data from NASA, ESA, Hubble, JWST, Chandra, and the Parker Solar Probe, Starstruck rebuilds the most iconic two-dimensional images in human history as walkable, to-scale universes. What was once a famous photograph becomes a place audiences can inhabit, touch, and traverse. This is not a film about the cosmos. It is an invitation to step inside it.
Visitors stand within the Pillars of Creation as a star is born, witness Betelgeuse detonate as a supernova, and feel spacetime warp around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. They step aboard recreations of the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory — and look ahead to the Giant Magellan Telescope, rising in Chile’s Atacama Desert, poised to search for habitable worlds beyond our solar system.
Starstruck is a poem about what we are. Billions of years of stars living, dying, and recycling their matter gave rise to a small, green-blue world — a fragile miracle against impossible odds. The carbon in our hands, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones were forged in supernovae. “We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” (Carl Sagan) To walk these scales is to feel what astronauts call the overview effect — Earth as one borderless whole, and humanity as a single, fragile experiment.

We didn’t make a film about wonder. We made a place built from hard science: real data, real telescopes, real physics. Because space isn’t mysterious. It’s a real place with a real address. And when people feel that from the inside, they begin to understand that the universe isn’t chaos — it’s organised, synchronised, governed by laws that made us. The more we understand the cosmos, the more we understand ourselves.

PRODUCTION 1:
Fever/ Virtual Worlds - Elliott Mizroch, Michael Sheridan, Alex Winterbotham, Pedro Palacios Pintor, Alice Wurtz,
Career Bac De Roda 126 Cinque Primera
08020 Barcelona, Spain
Tel: +1 2022772222
E-mail: elliott.mizroch@feverup.com
Web: http://smithsonianstarstruck.com/dc/

PRODUCTION 2:
Smithsonian - Denise Elliott, Nicki Marko, Dr. Laura Brenneman, Dr. Randall Smith, Elizabeth Bakacs, Dr. Rutuparna Das,
Career Bac De Roda 126 Cinque Primera
08020 Barcelona, Spain
Tel: +1 2022772222
E-mail: elliott.mizroch@feverup.com
Web: http://www.si.edu/

PRODUCTION 3:
Overhead 4D - Tomas Barnas,
Career Bac De Roda 126 Cinque Primera
08020 Barcelona, Spain
Tel: +1 2022772222
E-mail: elliott.mizroch@feverup.com
Web: http://overhead4d.com/

WORLD SALES:
Fever - Elliott Mizroch
Career Bac De Roda 126 Cinque Primera
08020 Baecelona, Spain
Tel: +1 2022772222
E-mail: elliott.mizroch@feverup.com
Web: http://feverup.com/en

ITALIAN DISTRIBUTION:
Fever - Elliott Mizroch
Career Bac De Roda 126 Cinque Primera
08020 Barcelona, Spain
Tel: +1 2022772222
E-mail: elliott.mizroch@feverup.com
Web: http://feverup.com/en

PRESS OFFICE:
Gabrielle Amado - Fever
Tel: +1 732 963 7582
E-mail: Gabrielle.Amado@feverup.com