About our fulldome shows

The concept

Imagine the presentation of a traditional multi-media planetarium show in a classic, slide projector-based theater. You'll see imagery appearing on an array of "screen areas" where banks of slide projectors are pointed. Some are trained on the horizon to make panoramas; others are fitted wide-angle lenses to project all-skies. Some have motorized zoom lenses, trained on motorized mirrors to make images "fly" in and around the dome. Others areas have projectors stacked 2- and 3-deep to make lap-dissolve screens for crossfading animations. There are special effect projectors to create clouds and snow, ripples of water, flashes of lightning, rotating galaxies, and more. And, of course, you'll see stars overhead.

Now imagine you're at the center of the room instead of the star projector. You're looking up straight up, with the entire dome filling your peripheral vision while the planetarium show is playing. If you had a camcorder with you, and it had a wide enough lens on it to pick up the entire dome in its field of view, you could record everything that went on in the theater. The image in your camera would look like a circle, with the zenith at the center, and the horizon around the circumference of the circle.

Now, imagine playing the video you made. If you looked at it on a TV, you'd see the circle, as depicted here.

That's basically the concept of fulldome video: projecting a full dome's worth of imagery — circles called dome masters — through video projectors onto the dome. No floating rectangles from single video projectors, just a big video all-sky, usually shown through a fisheye lens (or several).

While we say video projectors, we're really talking about computer graphics displays. The definition of video is not limited to what you see on television; they're called video cards in your computer, after all.

What we do

In our example above, we mentioned aiming a video camera at the dome. That's not what we do, of course. We actually create the dome master circles in software.

We began with the same audio and visual source material from our classic show packages. Then, with the freedom and creativity allowed by video graphics and editing programs, we fashioned zooms, digital composites, and animations to utilize the dome space more creatively than traditional projection technology allows. We work our images using such programs as Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. To curvature-correct a classic show's 2-D imagery for the dome space, we use tools like Digistar 3 Virtual Projector, an After Effects plug-in developed by Evans & Sutherland. Our star fields come from Sky-Skan's DigitalSky.

We then program a show using After Effects timelines to choreograph the pictures to the show's soundtrack. Finally, we render out a sequence of still frames that form the visual part of the show, and WAV file for the soundtrack. We use those as the source material to make the movie files you ultimately play.

The result: scalable still imagery, seamless panoramas and all-skies, layered visuals (no more stars shining through planets), animations, video, and more — all now possible in the fulldome realm. When you're ready to bring fulldome video into your planetarium, the popular Loch Ness Productions shows — proven to be audience favorites over the years — will be there, looking better than ever, to make the move with you.

Show package pricing and distribution

This fulldome stuff all new to you?

While we've been creating planetarium shows for more than a quarter century, fulldome video is a relatively new concept for many people. We've been working in the fulldome medium for several years now, and have posted lots of information here on our Web site. Be sure to check out A Planetarian's Primer For Fulldome and our Fulldome Web Resources links.

As always, please contact us if you have more questions.