Real-time Digital Dome Rendering
In the summer of 2008 the Adler Planetarium hosted the annual meeting of the International Planetarium Society. At that time I had been working on a number of visualization projects with Adler staff, including the installation of a cluster of Linux PCs in the Adler’s digital dome theater. Our goal was to explore ways of generating custom real-time content for dome shows, which were (and largely still are) limited to the playback of pre-rendered movies.
I had prior experience with real-time dome rendering, having done early work with programmable GPUs in a 4-meter dome at NASA Langley Research Center in 2002. I had spent my years in Chicago adapting real-time visualization code to a wide array of display technologies, and the digital full-dome was another challenge in that vein. It was my further intention to adapt my doctoral work to the full-dome display and defend my dissertation interactively in the Adler dome. The convergence of these influences coincided with IPS 2008, and I was invited to present an overview of real-time dome rendering techniques at the conference.
The resulting paper gave broad coverage of real-time display and spherical correction techniques, targeted toward the non-technical planetarium crowd, and intended to teach them a bit about the nature of 3D graphics hardware and its incompatibility with domes. I recently decided to revisit and revise this paper. Here’s the PDF.