Introduction: Fulldome

This special section of Digital Creativity focuses on the area of fulldome projection as an art medium, as it is gaining more attention in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This is mainly due to the rapid development of digital fulldome projectors and the increasing availability of both fixed and portable dome structures that are being used outside their traditional homes in astronomy and science centres. Fulldome has coalesced over the past decade due to the convergence of technologies within the planetarium, as well as growing numbers of nomadic audio-visual installations for the festival and concert scene. The prevailing format of much digital media art, and our digital culture in general, is the flat screen in all its various sizes. From the surface of the iPhone to projections as large as entire buildings, we are most familiar with the metaphor of the screen-as-window: a flat plane that opens into the digital dimension. Despite the rise of IMAX (especially the curved Omnimax format) and ongoing experiments with virtual environments, digital holography and various volumetric displays, the world of screens is emphatically flat. Now that the cathode-ray tube has been all but banished, the increasing thinness of display technologies such as OLED (organic light-emitting display) points towards the future dominance of viewing panels that intersect our physical reality with slivers of imagery taken from our ubiquitous digital cameras or constructed entirely by CGI. The technology for turning actual windows into displays with varying degrees of transparency, mixing the real and virtual view, is not far away from commercialisation. Despite this ubiquity, there are other ways of experiencing the digital world that engage our vision in a more holistic sense than merely emulating the planar perspective of the Renaissance. One of most widespread, and growing, technologies is fulldome which uses structural or inflatable domes as a projection surface and maps images onto part or all of the hemisphere. First developed for a planetarium setting, the fulldome offers a very different kind of image that encourages the viewer to look around their space. Many dome installations encourage the audience to sit on the floor or stand up and walk about; others use tilted seating with moveable headrests to enable more headturning. The dome envelops the audience in a way that no flat screen, no matter how large, can achieve even in stereoscopic 3-D. A complaint levelled by many cinema-goers at contemporary 3-D films is that the effect adds little to the story, often serving as a gimmick to boost otherwise mediocre storylines. The need for specialist eyewear and the effects of convergence and physical location within the cinema are all problematic for stereoscopic imagery. The central issue, though, is that a stereo 3-D film is not fundamentally more involving than traditional cinema because it uses the same narrative techniques and conventions: it merely invests them with a little added depth. On the other hand, the best dome films and animations make full use of the huge canvas offered by the dome interior. They deploy multiple viewing points that locate action to the sides or directly above the viewer, and take advantage of the height at the apex of the dome. This sensation of height, distance and scale is essential to the dome experience and perhaps its most unique feature. Although some dome productions are straightforward translations of standard films into Digital Creativity 2012, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1–4