Space History Meets the Future in Interactive UCF Exhibit

Landing humans on the moon was just a dream when UCF was founded in 1963. But we dared to believe - developing the talent and inventing the technologies to make it reality. That same spirit still drives us today.

We are America's Space University. And we celebrate UCF Space Week to honor our origin as we dare to build what's next.

The John C. Hitt Library is likely the only place where you can find odes to Citronaut, space mice, sports and human spaceflight together in one room.

A new, interactive exhibit, debuts this week in the Immersion Studio on the fourth floor of the library's Digital Exploration Center.

The exhibit brings six decades of UCF, United States and international space history and culture beyond the archives and into visitors' hands. It draws on digital assets from UCF's former student newspaper, Central Florida Future, NASA, UCF Athletics and the university.

UCF Libraries graduate research assistant Eric Thompson '19, a history alum pursuing a doctorate in texts and technology, is the mind and heart behind the project. He set out to maximize the studio's potential through its 270-degree immersive projection and interactive touch capabilities.

Eric Thompson '19, a history alum pursuing a doctorate in texts and technology, enjoys bringing history to life beyond the classroom, in places like museums, parks monuments and the UCF Libraries' Immersion Studio. (Photo by Brooke Morris '22)

Over the past two months, he meticulously selected every image and wrote nearly 7,000 words for the exhibit's text boxes, bringing the experience together through an iterative process that used artificial intelligence (AI) to generate code.

The Cocoa Beach, Florida, native worked as a bicycle mechanic for nearly a decade before enrolling through DirectConnect to UCF to pursue a more fulfilling career as a public historian. He wants to bring history to life beyond the classroom, in places like museums, parks, and monuments.

"I was giving tours of a Civil War painting at the Atlanta History Center, and when you're doing programming like that it's exciting because it's different every single time depending on the makeup of whoever comes through," he says. "I think the best public history exhibits make some sort of argument. We're not just saying, 'Hey, look at this neat thing from 100 years ago.' We're also saying what that meant back then, and how it ties to our society today."

Here, Thompson explains how the exhibit came together, what visitors can expect and the stellar result when the humanities collide with technology.

Thompson's exhibit showcases the inspiration of UCF's Mission X Space Game against the 1966 Gemini X patch.

What inspired this exhibit?

At the beginning of this semester, the library was discussing its programming for UCF Space Week 2026 and my supervisor asked if I wanted to propose something specifically for the Immersion Studio. I started with just a wall - I built a very, very bare-bones prototype that was basically just the mission patches from the space games. Can I make this work? What does it look like from there? How do we do some more history or scholarship along with that?

That's where some of the other elements - old newspaper articles, actual NASA mission patches, UCF's space origins - started to come in. One advantage of a digital exhibit is that you're not constrained by what fits in a 4-foot-wide glass case. Nearly all images are clickable with a tap of your finger so you can read more information.

The texts and technology program has been recognized as a leader in digital humanities education. How did you apply what you've been studying to this project?

One of the research methods that texts and technology students use a lot is something called critical making. It's a way of building something, thinking and writing through that process very deliberately, and iterating on it. That's what this process was.

Another key element was how I used AI. I wrote all of the content. I picked all of the images and even hand-sketched the layout, but I don't know how to code. I didn't write the programming that made boxes be boxes. I would prefer a human whose job is to program and get paid for it, but I didn't have that opportunity in this case.

So the code work on this was done with a generative AI tool, Claude. I had a leg up through coursework that was explicitly about using AI like this, including a significant manual review process. It has to be really deliberate.

What do you hope this exhibition adds to campus culture?

As a university, we don't have the same generations of history that other places do because we were founded just 63 years ago. So we have an opportunity, all of us, to take a more active role in shaping it. I hope somebody will learn something about our campus history and use that to build positive change here on campus.

How did you highlight the humanity of this tech-forward exhibit?

I very intentionally wrote the names of the people on the mission patches with crews. There are people at home who designed these, who thought through these experiments and these projects. Most of these patches are human-forward designs, and people made choices to symbolize our values and what's important to us.

Why should people come visit this?

The Immersion Studio opened in February, and we want to show what the space is capable of. My hope is that faculty will come in and realize they can bring a class here or design a presentation. Student organizations can hold meetings here. I plan to do my dissertation defense in this space one day.

"We want to show what the space is capable of." - Eric Thompson '19

The Digital Exploration Center is a really interesting space on campus. People who aren't necessarily in something tech-focused are still going to need to learn how to use more modern tools and need workstations and equipment that their departments may or may not have.

So this is a really high-powered space that's open to anybody on campus. I would love it if somebody found this space because of this exhibit; that would be a win.

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