PLANETARIUM RIO TINTO ALCAN
The fulldome video technology allows us to travel anywhere in the universe to look at whatever we want to see. Every show is different because it’s driven by what’s happening on a day to day basis
WHAT’S THE DESIGN? It’s a beautiful building. Two metal cones, which look like telescopes tubes from a distance, point towards the sky and are located above the planetarium’s two theatres. Overall, there’s 4,000sq m (43,000sq ft) of space for exhibits, classrooms and function rooms. The basement links the planetarium with the biodôme, so visitors can walk from one to the other without having to go outside. That’s a big plus for our visitors, especially school groups and senior citizens.
WHAT’S THE CONTENT? We have two 18m (59ft) dome theatres – most planetariums only have one, a
Multi-touch exhibit screens enable
visitors to navigate animations, images, texts and videos
multimedia theatre and an astronomical theatre. We use fulldome video technol- ogy to put images on the dome in the multimedia theatre. The dome is a little more than a hemisphere and goes down to 1m (3ft) from the floor. When visitors walk into the theatre, they’re completely immersed in the image. The theatre doesn’t have a centrally positioned optomechanical star projector, so this gives us a whole new flexibility for the kind of presentations we can have. Unlike a traditional planetarium, the multimedia dome has a level floor and doesn’t have fixed seating, so we can use the space for temporary exhibitions, multimedia shows, dance displays and theatre presentations. The second dome is the astronomi-
cal theatre. It’s more traditional and has an optomechanical star projector in the middle, which was built by Japanese company Konica Minolta to our very exact specifications. We project the sky
onto the dome and show the stars in the most pristine conditions possible. The star projector is supported by
another fulldome array of video projec- tors. We call that approach a hybrid system. The video system is slave to the optomechanical star projector, so when we have the stars up on the dome and want to display, for instance, the lines between the stars to draw the constel- lation Orion, all the lines will come from the video system. If we move the sky, reproducing the motion of the stars going from east to west, the video images will sync and follow the stars very closely. That gives us flexibility to show the constellations, frontiers between the constellations and all the astronomical coordinate lines we use in astronomy. We can also tag the stars and write their names beside them. The astronomical theatre has concen-
tric, fixed seating with everyone facing centre. The floor is raised 50cm (1.6ft)
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