A Million Stars

Posted by: Ray Worthy Nov 10 2008, 11:29 PM
Stars in His Eyes




Japanese inventor Takayuki Ohira pursues his boyhood hobby to the ends of
the universe--for real money.
As a teenager Takayuki Ohira built rockets and tinkered with jet engines.
The rockets became a danger to low-flying aircraft and to the farmers
whose fields he commandeered as temporary launch sites. The jet
engines--he planned to bolt a pair to his bicycle--blew up. The would-be
missilemaker instead applied his self-taught engineering skills to the
less hazardous task of building planetarium projectors.
Using his bedroom as a workshop, he took whatever jobs he could find to
pay for parts and components. "I worked in all sorts of places, as a store
clerk in convenience stores, at gas stands," recalls Ohira, 37, from his
cramped, windowless office in a suburb west of Tokyo. An area craftsman
taught him how to beat and twist metal. A neighbor working for camera and
consumer electronics maker Canon (nyse: CAJ - news - people ) helped fill
in the gaps in his engineering skills.
Finished when he still attended high school, the first projector was
primitive. He created stars by burning tiny holes through plastic film
wrapped around a light. A second machine, able to project 45,000 points of
light, was built while he was studying for a mechanical engineering
degree. It wasn't until he finished his third projector, though, that he
felt ready to unveil his work to the world.
Able to sketch a picture of the Milky Way from 1.7 million dots of light
(created from tiny holes in a disc through which the light shines), his
machine, the Megastar, took two years of weekends, evenings and vacation
to build while hunkered down in his cluttered bedroom. He was staying at
his folks' home and eating instant noodles and other cheap,
convenience-store fare. "I didn't go out dating or for fun at all," Ohira
says.
During the day he worked as an engineer for Sony (nyse: SNE - news -
people ). He used most of his salary to fund his project. "Compared to
when I was working part-time jobs, I had more money coming in," he notes
cheerily. Ohira managed to set aside $50,000 for his projector, or more
than half his wages over two years. "The experts said I couldn't do it,"
he says. "At the time it was considered impossible to build a machine that
could project more than a million points of light."
Projectors at even the best planetariums throw out around 10,000 dots of
light, because, of 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, that's about how
many are visible to the human eye on a dark night. Though most stars from
his machine are indiscernible as points of lights, massed together, Ohira
points out, they're crucial because they re-create the milky backdrop that
gives our galaxy its name.
Megastar differed from conventional machines in another major way. It was
small and light enough to carry, and that mobility came in handy. Eager to
demonstrate his work in front of the International Planetarium Society, in
1998 he took his projector to the group's biannual meeting in London. His
scrimping had left just enough money to buy a round-trip economy-class air
ticket to Europe.
He couldn't, however, afford to ship his projector as cargo and so decided
to carry the boxed 27-kilogram device on as hand luggage. "I was sure they
would slap a surcharge on," Ohira recalls, laughing. To his astonishment
the carrier, Virgin Atlantic, let him take it on the jetliner.
After sweet-talking the airline in Tokyo he had to convince the world's
planetarium elite gathering in London he wasn't a buffoon. "My English
wasn't great, so when I told them how many stars it could project they
looked at me as though they thought I couldn't even get my numbers right,"
he remembers.
The sniggering stopped when he turned on the machine. "No one could
believe that he created this quality projector as a hobby, and people
gasped at the beauty of the star field it produced," recalls Susan
Reynolds, president of the International Planetarium Society, who was
there when Ohira unveiled his star projector in London.
Back in Japan Ohira quit his job at Sony and got to work on his next
model, a machine able to project five million stars, each from a hole
one-thousandth of a millimeter across, seared by laser through a disc.
So far he has built four. Two are at planetariums in Japan; he hires out
the other pair for star shows and pop concerts. He is working on a smaller
version for small planetariums that, at $50,000, would cost a quarter of
what the larger models do.
With it he wants to penetrate the U.S. market, whose 2,000 planetariums
are often small domes owned by schools and colleges. That market for
low-cost stargazing is dominated by Spitz, a Pennsylvania projector maker.
Ohira has also gone mass market. Commissioned by Japanese game and
computer maker Sega (other-otc: SEGNF.PK - news - people ) Sammy, Ohira
designed a home planetarium dubbed the Homestar that sells for less than
$200. In the past two years Sega has sold 200,000 of them in Japan. Sales
in the U.S. and other overseas markets began in September. Sega pays Ohira
a royalty--a rare win for an inventor in Japan--though neither will say
how big his cut is.
The popularity of Ohira and the Homestar has helped to rekindle interest
in big star domes in Japan, says Kanji Hattori, an official from the Japan
Planetarium Association, a group with over 300 members. Hattori, who works
as a show navigator at Japan's leading star dome, in Nagoya, has noticed a
pickup in visitor numbers. "He's created a small boom," Ohira asserts.
Used to frugality, the creator of the hit educational toy doesn't plan to
spend his share of the take on an office with more space. And who needs a
window in his line of work? The money will likely end up paying for
something else. Working on planetariums has helped Ohira make friends at
JAXA, Japan's space agency, which develops rockets and satellites. It may
be time to return to something a tad more explosive.

Posted by: Owen Phairis Nov 11 2008, 09:46 AM
Interesting!

I was told one of Ohiras' projectors was demonstrated at the recent IPS meeting in Chicago, and with 10 miilion stars they said it was nothing less than breath taking....

Owen