A new idea in the works at the planetarium is visualizing science-related facts on the dome.  These little movies would last only a few seconds – long enough to narrate or write out something like “Humans not only have unique fingerprints – they have unique tongue prints as well.”  Then perhaps a person standing behind glass is filmed as they plaster their tongue print on the glass; to the audience it would appear as though this giant tongue were being laid on the dome.   Not the most glamorous of examples, but you get the idea that these facts are just supposed to make you go, “hmm.” or maybe even “Iii-nteresting.”  (plus it’s been done in Earth, Moon & Sun!  Though dinosaur tongue prints are probably negligible seeing as they are unavailable for filming.)

So far the facts that would work well on a dome have these properties:

• portrayal of “actual size.” For example the tentacles of the giant Arctic jellyfish reach up to 120 ft. in length – the lengh of that tentacle could wrap around our dome two times.  Imagine sitting in the black of the dome, the muted bubbling of water as something swims around and around – and then you’re caught in the huge arms of a ginormous jellyfish.  The sense of scale might be a hard sell, but I think it could be really neat.

• speed. Any fact dealing with speed caught my eye.  Did you know the pileated woodpecker can strike a tree with the impact of 1200 g?  A human could comparatively strike a tree at 16 mph.  Perhaps too greusome to show.

• inside the body. What makes you sneeze?  why do you get dizzy?  what causes hiccups?  All of these questions are interesting and they all lend themselves to taking the audience inside the body.

And generally cool or gross things caught my eye.  Like the fact that killer whales can destroy sharks by ramming into them with their snouts.  The force is so hard the shark explodes.  Of course, my research at this point is still in the brainstorming stages, so none of these facts have been completely substantiated – for those who would wait for sharks to explode.  Because 43.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

A blog I have scoured through and read fairly frequently is updated by John Kricfalusi, who is known most for Ren and Stimpy. His blog is very informative, and he gives very good opinion on a lot of different things involving animation. What’s really great is he’ll throw up clips from different segments of cartoons, breaking down all the key poses and analyzing different aspects of the actions. He’ll talk about things like anticipation, follow-through, secondary motion, etc. what are some good things to keep in mind and what are some not so good things. Certain pitfalls animators can easily fall into, not excluding other sides of the dice like character design, background layouts, color use, and much more.

Even though he mostly focuses on 2d flat-screen animation, a lot of concepts can and should be applied to 3d, and by extension of that also applied to the dome setting. Things can be a lot tougher for animating characters in domes, such as having strong silhouettes, staging, and subtleties and perception of close ups.  Enough of my rambling though, here’s the link:

John K. Stuff

I should also probably note that even though we share the same first and last initials, and both have tough last names to pronounce (his probably more than mine I think); its not the only reason I read and enjoy his blog!

We’ve been curious here how we can expand the use of our dome beyond presenter led real-time and pre-rendered shows.  In these programs, the audience is being feed information while being for the most part, passive. After reading “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter” by Steven Johnson,  I’ve become much more interested in how the gaming model works and how we can utilize it. In a nutshell, Johnson explains that video games are popular because they put the user in complex situations and challenge them to figure something out, as opposed to a more traditional method of spoon feeding ideas. He also shows similarities to this in more complex TV storylines from shows such as Lost. These challenges and mysteries, once solved, give a sense of satisfaction and a better understanding of material to the viewer.

We’ve been talking with Eric Knisley over at RENCI about experimenting with the Unity game engine on the dome and how we can extend the challenging gaming experience to some of our presentations. The difficulty, beyond technical issues, getting 200-300 people to play a game that is typically controlled by one person. People have experimented with IR and other techniques that have been sucessful for simple interactions. But maybe there are other ways to create presentations and even pre-rendered shows that really challenge the viewer to figure things out on a different level.

Pixar has done it again with another amazing short. No dialog, just wonderful character animation coupled with very tight storytelling.

Often times we fall prey to the documentary style show production on a dome. The format being a heavy handed narration and visuals that directly correspond to concepts discussed by the disembodied voice of the narrator. This short as I said has absolutely zero dialog, just the characters reacting to their environment, and each other, but a touching story is still told.

Often we talk about the dome as an immersive environment but the flat screen can be equally immersive. The only distinction is how well we get our audience to empathize and become enveloped in whatever it is we show them. Surrounding someone with an environment doesn’t place them in a scene, but getting them emotionally involved in what it is they’re seeing makes it an experience. A concept that I’ll be trying to understand and emulate in projects to come.

One other thing that I thoroughly enjoy about this short and the most recent release “UP” is there use of clouds, fog, and sky. Still grappling with getting volumetric fluids to look good and work correctly on the dome.

David Benning over at the ARTS Lab at University of New Mexico just announced that DomeFest 2009, which had been postponed from June to an undetermined date, will happen after all. The dates set are September 25-27 2009 and it will be located at UNM in Albuquerque. Similar to previous years, there will a Juried Show, full show screenings, technical and production talks.

Here are some dates to keep in mind:
+ 06 July: Registration opens
+ 24 July: Papers, Talks & “Making of…” Proposals Due
+ 04 August: Juried Show Submissions Due
+ 18 August: Accepted “Making of…” content due

We’re hoping to go, but with the current North Carolina state gov budget cuts, it’s not looking so good…

We recently had a discussion on what lends itself to a dome. Seeing as Star projectors are no longer the center piece of the technology,we have an entire surface to expose and fill with content.
Space science has typically been the focus of Planetariums and is a primary focus even today. A dome offers itself to be a simulation of the sky above. Though as the technology gets more sophisticated it has become a way to illustrate space with a little “s”. We can deal with space inside a cell, or explore the volume of a dense molecule.

Some Visual devices we know work on a dome are as follows:
Moving to a large open area from a some what cramped one.
Moving through tunnels.
Flying along the surface of any object. (Moon, Mars, a really long line of text)
Flipping the horizon
Moving through objects
Shifting Perspective

Though a characteristic that seems to be prevalent in our continued exploration of the medium is motion. Still sequences seem to be a thing of the past. Even a slight rotation or scale is better than a static shots. I’m sure this list will continue to grow as we develop new ways to exploit the unique environment of the dome, and we define a visual language for how a dome is used.

I’ve been working on a scene in our new production Magic Tree House, and experimented with some camera movements. I’ve learned from the great Eric Knisley that you need to be very careful with motions of the camera, since sickness and disorientation can come very quickly in the dome environment. When I asked how you can prevent nausea from occurring in camera moves, Eric would explain it with one word: Stately. The classic entrance of the couple or girl coming down those large ballroom steps in those old movies was what came to mind after hearing that. Time to put it into practice! Here are two different approaches I took to this scene where we enter the treehouse for the first time. The first test was imagining the camera was attached to the head of the person. I thought that perhaps the reason why people would get sick was the combination of both rotation and positional translation of the camera.

Although I didn’t get very sick with it, the people I showed it too here did get sick while watching it. Maybe it was all those FPS games that I played for long hours that allowed me to get used to it. Also that I was the one who actually made it so I knew when motions were going to happen. Either way it wasn’t very successful for a larger audience. It may seem like its not so bad in the video while watching it on a flat screen, everyone really seemed to notice it in the dome.

So knowing that I was needing to tone it down a lot, I abandoned the idea that the camera was attached to the head of a person ascending the ladder. I made the camera move a smooth motion that was floating through space. Even though I miss the idea of making the motion more organic, everyone who was sick from the first example were much happier with this new one.

If anyone has any insight to their own experiences with camera moves in dome space, please feel free to share what you know by either leaving a comment or dropping me an email!

We just started production on a new project, Magic Tree House: Space Mission. Based on the popular children’s book series, MTH is a show that we’ve been showing in analogue form since 2004 at Morehead.

We’re now working with the writer of the show, Will Osborne to convert the show to a digital format, spruce up some of the graphics and update the content so it reflects our current understanding of the Solar System (like reclassifying Pluto as a dwarf planet). The project is due to wrap in early September.

Seeing as 3d software is designed classically for the flat screen, there has yet to be much adaptation to working with 3d in a Fisheye view. So to help us understand what we’re looking at we use a rig that points 5 cameras in different directions. Generally focusing on what happens in the front, left, right and Up cameras. We do think about what should be happening behind the viewer, but it should never be there for very long, as we can’t see through the backs of our heads.

When I started to model the tree and its magical house for the upcoming digital conversion of Magic Tree House: Space Mission,  I did some research on the internets and found that some of the best-looking trees where going through the ZBrush pipeline.  ZBrush is a powerful sculpting program which works well for organic objects; I’ve seen many great things come out of ZBrush with a level of artistic detail that isn’t so easily or efficiently achieved in Maya.

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