Planetarium #1
2016, developing projection system and media server for the world’s biggest planetarium
Planetarium #1 was opened as the biggest dome projection among planetariums in the world. At the same time, as a non-government project with very limited budget, it uses state-of-art solutions to achieve unprecedented cost-efficiency without compromising on guest experience. I was invited to design and implement a projection setup together with media server and playback system. My design concept was to achieve target 200000 lumens of brightness with 40 educational-grade projectors, instead of 10 expensive professional installation projectors and to use only one PC as playback and signal output/distribution. Another challenge was calibrating and blending so many fragments into a seamless 8k fulldome projection. We wanted to use VIOSO software, famous for its quality and known previous record of 24 projectors per one PC. To enable VIOSO workflow, within our non-standard spatial setup I developed a creative workaround. To provide a single-source view on the whole projection area I used a livestream from a 8K 360 camera, projecting it on a virtual sphere and then capturing again by a virtual camera with required parameters to feed into VIOSO. Result of our efforts became a cultural hub for diverse arts, popular science and creative technology entrepreneurship. The importance and contributions was officially recognized by Nvidia, TouchDesigner, VIOSO, and the International Planetarium Society.
