Now some background on full dome video.

Firstly most domes are conforming to unidirectional seating, making the dome more like an immersive movie screen. They generate a full dome image using two projectors with fish-eye lenses that each display 180 degrees of a dome surface creating a full 360 degree image.

Though, there are some domes that use only one projector that displays a truncated 3/4ths image of a dome. This blank area of course is behind the viewer.

My challenge was creating a flat story board that is interpretable for people who aren’t used to viewing what is called a “Dome Master”. Which is in essence a circle that represents a flattened dome, inside a black square bounding box.

Where the bottom of the circle represents whats in front of you, and the top behind you. This format creates quite a bit of visual distortion that looks like a video shot through a fish-eye lens.

My result was to think of the dome as a viewer and make it encompass only 180 degrees similar to the traditional Raster Area of a story board, but also allow for banded room that could be used to explain what would be going on beyond the persons peripheral. This space allows for staging of objects to come from behind the viewer. Using some minor research in fields of view I tried to bread down what would be considered the range of readable text, and perceivable peripheral image recognition to create a title and action safe. Though these areas are relative to the direction and turning of the head.

The end result is the template you see, it offers a flat view of what might be visible if you were sitting in a standard dome uni-directionally oriented.

As I continue to tackle the new and exciting frontier of full dome video, I’ll try to post some of my breakthroughs, insights, and possible failures in this challenging medium.

Peter Althoff

Granted, I still need to transfer the posts from my previous site, but this is my new and improved portfolio site.