Gaming on a Dome IMAX - has anyone done it?

[Mass Effect]

To be clear, I'm referring to the kind pictured above, not the flat Imax's.

I live close to a city that has such an Imax in a museum, which I've been to quite a few times. As a kid I've always wanted to play a game on it just once (because who wouldn't?). Now that I'm older I've thought about inquiring to see if they would let me rent it out or something (especially since the pandemic has probably cratered ticket sales), but I seriously doubt they would let me.

It has been done in the past, apparently. There are some news stories about a couple of game tournaments from 2002-2004 being held in dome Imax theaters:

Maxgames tournament gets IMAX billing

Final games to be played in the IMAX Dome in San Jose; Red vs. Blue creators and Halo 2 trailer to make special appearance.

www.gamespot.com

Gaming on the IMAX

www.neowin.net

So I'm wondering if anyone here has had a chance to play on one? Either through one of these tournaments or another special event, or by renting one out? If you have, what was it like?

 

[LordHuffnPuff]

In the mid-00s, The Franklin Institute science museum in Philadelphia used to have a benefit fundraiser every year called the Franklin Family Funfest. This was a thing for the wealthier folks in the city to buy expensive tickets to and bring their kids, with proceeds helping to fund the institute. The entire museum was shut down for the private event, which had fancy food, free access to all the attractions and fun kids stuff like face painting, make-your-own ice cream sundaes, a balloon artist, and so forth. They didn't play video games on the IMAX dome but something that they would do is rent out a bunch of arcade machines and move them into the planetarium (which was always dark) while running some other console-style games on the planetarium dome. It wasn't IMAX but it was a giant dome, so it was pretty close.

The issue is that games aren't designed to be played on that sort of giant curved screen, so you would get all sorts of weird image stretching and distortion. This was also true on days when they would use the IMAX dome for regular, commercial movies (I saw Star Trek there years ago.) IMAX dome movies are shot in such a way that they fill the screen instead of being stretched or subjected to what is functionally a kind of letterboxing. It's a cool idea but entirely for novelty, once it wears off you realize that without an image designed specifically for that type of display what you're seeing is less than optimal.

 

[purseowner]

Imagine Tetris Effect in IMAX

 

[uncredited male mk2]

I have seen some sphere setups where you sit inside like the flight sim arcade machines. Usually they try and mess with the FOV settings to get the distortion to 'align' closer to the curvature.

 

[Lord Fanny]

That doesn't really seem like it'd be all that fun to play to me. It feels like it'd be hard to take in everything going on

 

[Giraffe Keighley]

I remember a Smash tourney at the San Jose IMAX years ago

Was neat, but they didn't use the entire screen, sadly

 

[FinFunnels]

In the mid-00s, The Franklin Institute science museum in Philadelphia used to have a benefit fundraiser every year called the Franklin Family Funfest. This was a thing for the wealthier folks in the city to buy expensive tickets to and bring their kids, with proceeds helping to fund the institute. The entire museum was shut down for the private event, which had fancy food, free access to all the attractions and fun kids stuff like face painting, make-your-own ice cream sundaes, a balloon artist, and so forth. They didn't play video games on the IMAX dome but something that they would do is rent out a bunch of arcade machines and move them into the planetarium (which was always dark) while running some other console-style games on the planetarium dome. It wasn't IMAX but it was a giant dome, so it was pretty close.

The issue is that games aren't designed to be played on that sort of giant curved screen, so you would get all sorts of weird image stretching and distortion. This was also true on days when they would use the IMAX dome for regular, commercial movies (I saw Star Trek there years ago.) IMAX dome movies are shot in such a way that they fill the screen instead of being stretched or subjected to what is functionally a kind of letterboxing. It's a cool idea but entirely for novelty, once it wears off you realize that without an image designed specifically for that type of display what you're seeing is less than optimal.

Click to shrink...

Lol The Franklin Institute is the only place I had ever seen IMAX movies at when I was a kid, so for the longest time I thought all IMAX screens were dome screens. I didn't see a "regular" IMAX movie until I was in my 20's and I was legit confused. I was like "wait, this is just a big screen???" 😅

 

[Teiresias]

I worked in an IMAX dome theater in a museum for about ten years during my college years. They had a digital projector that projected into the forward center of the done (so where the audience, when seated, would be looking if they just looked straight ahead) that they used during planetarium shows. It obviously didn't fill even 1/8 of the dome, but I did bring my PS2 in a few times and some of us played a few rounds of SSX and some other games on it. I honestly can't remember if I was able to get audio hooked up though, I'm thinking not.

I remember thinking it was cool how big the image was, but nothing mind blowing since it was a 90s projector so was only 720p most likely, and obviously the PS2 had it's image quality issues blown up to that size.

The only equipment that could project on the entire dome was the actual IMAX film projector with the fish eye lens, and the planetarium projector. You obviously can't hook a video game console up to a film projector or a planetarium projector of 90s vintage.

 

[Beer Monkey]

IMAX dome movies are shot in such a way that they fill the screen instead of being stretched or subjected to what is functionally a kind of letterboxing.

Click to shrink...

'IMAX dome' movies are regular flat full-frame IMAX movies (which are also shot to fill your field of view), no special shooting, but the projector has a lens that can largely compensate for the dome distortion.

 

[Teenage Fansub]

I'm guessing it wouldn't be the best lag-wise, and anyone playing tournament fighting games and the like are looking at their own monitor rather than the big projection.

 

[LordHuffnPuff]

'IMAX dome' movies are regular flat full-frame IMAX movies (which are also shot to fill your field of view), no special shooting, but the projector has a lens that can largely compensate for the dome distortion.

Click to shrink...

Huh! I guess it probably has to do with the films being in much higher resolution (in the past anyway) and sometimes higher framerate on top of that as well. Either way, normal films (and games) look way off.

 

[Teiresias]

'IMAX dome' movies are regular flat full-frame IMAX movies (which are also shot to fill your field of view), no special shooting, but the projector has a lens that can largely compensate for the dome distortion.

Click to shrink...

Film-based dome theaters have fish eye lenses. There was a specific IMAX format for films that wanted exclusive dome exhibition, originally called Omnimax.

The camera for the format used a fisheye lens too that put the image on the frame as a kind of distorted ovel. Look up the IMAX Wikipedia page to see an image of what the frame looked like, I can't post a link on mobile. The image, projected through the fisheye lens of the projector fixed the distortion and it fit properly on the dome.

There were probably less than 10 films ever actually shot like this though, so the majority of films shown on domes were filmed flat and do have curvature distortion if projected through an original IMAX dome projector.

In fact, when Star Wars Ep 2 AOTC released in IMAX it only released in flat, complete with black bars on the film. On a dome the bottom black bar became an awkward curved black hump at the bottom of the screen. I remember that vividly since I sat through literally hundreds of showings of that film.

When Disney released the first "commercial" IMAX film in "Fantasia 2000" they actually released a dome-specific print that took the dome and fisheye lens into account so it didn't have distortion.

I'm not sure if the state of things with the new digital protectors had changed though. I worked there well before any digital IMAX and before IMAX was in commercial theaters.

 

[Nacho]

I imagine the latency wouldnt make it very good for anything competitive, or really action based at all. But it would be fun for a really cinematic game, especially pc game that can really crank the visuals.

 

[Mass Effect]

The issue is that games aren't designed to be played on that sort of giant curved screen, so you would get all sorts of weird image stretching and distortion. This was also true on days when they would use the IMAX dome for regular, commercial movies (I saw Star Trek there years ago.) IMAX dome movies are shot in such a way that they fill the screen instead of being stretched or subjected to what is functionally a kind of letterboxing. It's a cool idea but entirely for novelty, once it wears off you realize that without an image designed specifically for that type of display what you're seeing is less than optimal.

Click to shrink...

Well, theoretically you could get around this on PC through different aspect ratios and FOV adjustments.

I remember a Smash tourney at the San Jose IMAX years ago

Was neat, but they didn't use the entire screen, sadly

Click to shrink...

I worked in an IMAX dome theater in a museum for about ten years during my college years. They had a digital projector that projected into the forward center of the done (so where the audience, when seated, would be looking if they just looked straight ahead) that they used during planetarium shows. It obviously didn't fill even 1/8 of the dome, but I did bring my PS2 in a few times and some of us played a few rounds of SSX and some other games on it. I honestly can't remember if I was able to get audio hooked up though, I'm thinking not.

I remember thinking it was cool how big the image was, but nothing mind blowing since it was a 90s projector so was only 720p most likely, and obviously the PS2 had it's image quality issues blown up to that size.

The only equipment that could project on the entire dome was the actual IMAX film projector with the fish eye lens, and the planetarium projector. You obviously can't hook a video game console up to a film projector or a planetarium projector of 90s vintage.

Click to shrink...

Interesting. So this is the kind of information I was looking for. Any external devices would need to be connected to a typical projector rather than anything that could fill out the entire dome. And that obviously takes out a lot of the excitement from it.

 

[Teiresias]

Interesting. So this is the kind of information I was looking for. Any external devices would need to be connected to a typical projector rather than anything that could fill out the entire dome. And that obviously takes out a lot of the excitement from it.

Click to shrink...

Remember that my time working in an IMAX theatre ended nearly 15 years ago, so that's just how things were then. Nowadays, there are 4k and 8k digital projection solutions that many institutional (aka museum) IMAX theaters are converting to that do cover the whole dome, but I don't know if they'd have a traditional HDMI and digital audio input for external sources like that.

 

[Deleted member 20831]

The HUD elements would probably not look nice on the dome, either it will be at the corners of the dome or will be placed at the center of the dome (interfering with the immersion).

Remember that my time working in an IMAX theatre ended nearly 15 years ago, so that's just how things were then. Nowadays, there are 4k and 8k digital projection solutions that many institutional (aka museum) IMAX theaters are converting to that do cover the whole dome, but I don't know if they'd have a traditional HDMI and digital audio input for external sources like that.

Click to shrink...

Wouldn't IMAX have their own format, which may not make it possible to play videos from non-IMAX formats?

 

[LordHuffnPuff]

The HUD elements would probably not look nice on the dome, either it will be at the corners of the dome or will be placed at the center of the dome (interfering with the immersion).



Wouldn't IMAX have their own format, which may not make it possible to play videos from non-IMAX formats?

Click to shrink...

I might be wrong but I think at least some - maybe most! - IMAX format films are still being shot on 70mm film (if you've ever seen IMAX film it's enormous) which is distinct from IMAX digital. To my understanding digital is used as a band-aid due to digital still being unable to capture the depth of detail that film can achieve. If your theater is primarily using film projection you'd be out of luck.

 

[Zephy]

With increasing image quality and field of view in VR headsets, it's becoming possible to have a good experience using them for 2D content projected on a virtual screen. I've tried apps that project movies or games on a giant cinema screen for which you can adjust the curve. Not a dome per se, but you might be interested in this nonetheless. I'm sure possibilities (and quality of experience) will expand in the future.

 

[Beer Monkey]

Film-based dome theaters have fish eye lenses. There was a specific IMAX format for films that wanted exclusive dome exhibition, originally called Omnimax.

Click to shrink...

I live in a city with an Omnimax theater, it was one of the first Omnimax theaters, it showed, for decades, every single IMAX movie. Nothing exclusive.

There is literally no such thing as a 'shot for only Omnimax' movie. Just IMAX movies run through a fisheye lens. Name a single film that was shot for only Omnimax (IMAX dome, a simple rebranding) presentation. There are none.

The thing about fisheye compensation via lens, it is far from perfect and even only somewhat close if sitting in the dead center.

 

[Unicorn]

This and theater rental just makes me think about the input lag and that would just make it so undesirable.

 

[Het_Nkik]

I've lived in the city with the first Imax Dome my whole life and the only thing I've seen there is a Spike & Mike festival of animation that they just projected as a regular rectangle in the middle of the dome lol.

 

[Teiresias]

I live in a city with an Omnimax theater, it was one of the first Omnimax theaters, it showed, for decades, every single IMAX movie. Nothing exclusive.

There is literally no such thing as a 'shot for only Omnimax' movie. Just IMAX movies run through a fisheye lens. Name a single film that was shot for only Omnimax (IMAX dome, a simple rebranding) presentation. There are none.

The thing about fisheye compensation via lens, it is far from perfect and even only somewhat close if sitting in the dead center.

Click to shrink...

Any film in this table (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IMAX_films) with OMNIMAX in the format column, I believe there was only seven if I'm counting correctly, used an OMNIMAX camera when shot, that produces a film frame like this:

"The dome system, which the San Diego Hall of Science called "Omnimax", uses films shot with a camera equipped with a fisheye lens that squeezes a highly-distorted anamorphic 180° field of view onto the 65 mm IMAX film. The lens is aligned below the center of the frame, and most of the bottom half of the circular field falls beyond the edge of the film. The part of the field that would fall below the edge of the dome is masked. When filming, the camera is aimed upward at an angle that matches the tilt of the dome. When projected through a matching fisheye lens onto a dome, the original panoramic view is recreated. Omnimax wraps 180° horizontally, 100° above the horizon and 22° below the horizon for a viewer at the center of the dome. Omnimax premiered in 1973, showing Voyage to the Outer Planets (produced by Graphic Films) and Garden Isle (by Roger Tilton Films) on a double bill. IMAX has since renamed the system "IMAX Dome", but some theaters (primarily those opened before the 2000s) continue to call it "Omnimax"."

I never claimed non-dome films aren't shown on domes, exactly the opposite since I worked at a dome and we showed "flat" films all the time, just that they will be distorted on the periphery and along the bottom. The distortion is much less noticeable on traditional IMAX documentary films that fill the entire frame than it was on any commercially converted (DMR'd) film that had letterboxing present in the frame like Star Wars.

I personally have never actually seen an OMNIMAX-shot film, but the museum I worked at did run "The Dream is Alive" (an Omnimax film about the space shuttle) when it released back in the mid-80s, but I wasn't working there then since I was still a kid. My co-workers raved about how it looked on the dome, but, alas, I never saw it myself.

 

[BlackGoku03]

I saw Tenet in one of these at a museum in Charlotte, NC. Was surreal and didn't look distorted. I'd rather watch movies on the dome than play games.

Now, a regular IMAX? Hell yeah, I'd love to play Miles Morales on a huge ass screen.

 

[Lmo2017]

Any attempt at this before like 3 years ago was probably through a secondary digital projector, which haven't been able to fill the entire screen or some kind of multi-projector set up. IMAX laser systems have the ability to replicate the film projector's ability to fill the dome screen now, but the lag is pretty rough. The best option would be for the players to have their own individual monitors and then have the dome projection for spectators.

If you have a game that has the ability to compensate for the delay it can be fun. Guitar Hero comes to mind. Really, more games should have that option.

Any film in this table (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IMAX_films) with OMNIMAX in the format column, I believe there was only seven if I'm counting correctly, used an OMNIMAX camera when shot, that produces a film frame like this:

"The dome system, which the San Diego Hall of Science called "Omnimax", uses films shot with a camera equipped with a fisheye lens that squeezes a highly-distorted anamorphic 180° field of view onto the 65 mm IMAX film. The lens is aligned below the center of the frame, and most of the bottom half of the circular field falls beyond the edge of the film. The part of the field that would fall below the edge of the dome is masked. When filming, the camera is aimed upward at an angle that matches the tilt of the dome. When projected through a matching fisheye lens onto a dome, the original panoramic view is recreated. Omnimax wraps 180° horizontally, 100° above the horizon and 22° below the horizon for a viewer at the center of the dome. Omnimax premiered in 1973, showing Voyage to the Outer Planets (produced by Graphic Films) and Garden Isle (by Roger Tilton Films) on a double bill. IMAX has since renamed the system "IMAX Dome", but some theaters (primarily those opened before the 2000s) continue to call it "Omnimax"."

I never claimed non-dome films aren't shown on domes, exactly the opposite since I worked at a dome and we showed "flat" films all the time, just that they will be distorted on the periphery and along the bottom. The distortion is much less noticeable on traditional IMAX documentary films that fill the entire frame than it was on any commercially converted (DMR'd) film that had letterboxing present in the frame like Star Wars.

I personally have never actually seen an OMNIMAX-shot film, but the museum I worked at did run "The Dream is Alive" (an Omnimax film about the space shuttle) when it released back in the mid-80s, but I wasn't working there then since I was still a kid. My co-workers raved about how it looked on the dome, but, alas, I never saw it myself.

Click to shrink...

This is also a fantastic primer on what a pure OMNIMAX presentation looks like. If you look at some of the old IMAX space films they'll be formatted like this, which is really cool. Modern IMAX films usually aren't formatted this way, especially after they updated the fisheye lenses on the projectors which allowed them to better spread out a 15/70 film frame. Many directors still try and shoot for a proper dome presentation though, so they'll use a graphic like the one above for framing their shots and working out safe title areas, etc.

 

[nded]

I imagine the input delay would be noticeable and even native 4K rendering resolution would look pretty rough on these things.