The Virtual Universe Atlas project was launched by the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium with significant programming support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as Stuart Levy.
Along with Celestia and Orbiter, and unlike most other planetarium applications, Digital Universe shares the capacity to visualize space from points outside Earth.
The Digital Universe Atlas has spun off a commercial-grade planetarium platform from SCISS called Uniview that was featured in the White House star party on October 7, 2009.
The Atlas database and Partiview interface is compatible with professional planetarium software such as Evans & Sutherland's Digistar and Sky-Skan's DigitalSky 2.
The Digital Universe is now a critical component of the OpenSpace open source interactive data visualization software suite.