Afrobotica, the Earthlight Historian

On June 13, 2026, Afrobotica debuted at the Museum of Science in Boston — what we believe is the first conversational AI character built for a full-dome planetarium. She is the pre-show to Earthlight World: An Astronaut's Journey, and before the show begins, visitors step up to a microphone and simply talk with her.

Meet the Earthlight Historian

Afrobotica is a character created by artist-astronaut Dr. Sian Proctor — geoscientist, poet, and the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft — realized here as the Earthlight Historian. She floats as a hologram in an ISS-style cupola with the Earth turning behind her, speaking about the planet seen from space, the Artemis program, and Dr. Proctor's vision of Earthlight and JEDI (Just, Equitable, Diverse, and Inclusive) space.

A facilitator moves through the audience with a microphone. One visitor at a time asks a question, and Afrobotica listens, thinks, and answers aloud in real time — her voice and the light language of her visor reacting as she speaks. Every conversation is live and unscripted, and she warmly inspires curiosity in anyone she talks to.

How she works (the short version)

Every exchange runs through a simple loop — listen → think → speak:

• Listen — a facilitator holds a push-to-talk button while the visitor speaks; their words are transcribed to text directly on the show machine.
• Think — a local language model, wrapped in a carefully engineered character prompt, writes a short, in-character reply.
• Speak — the reply is synthesized into Afrobotica's voice and projected across the dome with live captions.

We made a deliberate choice to run almost the entire experience offline, on a single low-power workstation. The visitor's voice never leaves the building — speech recognition and her language model both run on-device. Only her synthesized voice touches a cloud service, with a fully local fallback behind it for when the museum's internet hiccups.

There is a lot more under the hood — the provider architecture, the real-time dome render, how we keep a small model honest, and a complete, plain-language AI disclosure. The technical deep dive below has the full story.

From an art gallery to a planetarium

Chaotic Curiosity has worked with Dr. Proctor on Afrobotica since her XRts fellowship at Arizona State University in 2024. What started as a virtual-reality art gallery grew into a full-blown planetarium experience. Alongside Subtractive, Test Shot Starfish, Annu, and the incredible team at the Museum of Science — who pulled together the full production of Earthlight World — we made something truly special together.

For our team, this pre-show was an end-to-end effort: interaction design, real-time graphics and VFX, AI fine-tuning and benchmarking, testing and QA, and show flow with the museum.

See her this summer

If you're in Boston this summer, come meet her. Get tickets to Earthlight World and experience the show for yourself. For the poetry and philosophy that started it all, read Dr. Sian Proctor's vision of Earthlight.

Credits

• Dr. Sian Proctor — creator of Afrobotica; concept, character, and poetry
• Chaotic Curiosity — Don Balanzat (production, audio & voice design, show flow), Alireza Bahremand (lead research engineer), Dylan Kerr (3D & design)
• Subtractive — original score
• Test Shot Starfish and Annu — collaborating artists
• Museum of Science, Boston — venue and production partner
• Earth imagery courtesy of NASA