Canada’s Las Vegas Sphere is here - and I game on it

The Dome in Vancouver provides a budget-friendly and technologically impressive alternative to the Las Vegas Sphere, offering an immersive projection experience for planetarium shows and even gaming.

• The Vancouver Dome offers an immersive experience, modernizing an old planetarium with creative, budget-conscious technological solutions.

• A 10K by 10K resolution image is achieved using multiple synchronized Christie 4K projectors and a powerful workstation with professional GPUs.

• The Dome provides a unique, larger-than-life visual and auditory experience for both traditional shows and experimental content like gaming.

The Vancouver Dome, formerly the Star Theater at the H.R. McMillan Space Center, offers a unique domed projection experience akin to the Las Vegas Sphere but with significant budgetary constraints. Tobias and his team at Volumetric Camera Systems modernized the old installation while it remained open, employing creative solutions like high-resolution Christie projectors and a powerful workstation to deliver a stunning 10K by 10K image and immersive audio.

Modernizing the Dome

• 00:01:30 Tobias and his team faced the challenge of modernizing the historic Star Theater at the H.R. McMillan Space Center while it remained operational. This involved cleaning 70 years of dust from the acoustically transparent projection screen perforations and concealing visible seams, all done in bite-sized chunks during closing hours. The project required innovative solutions due to a significantly smaller budget compared to the Las Vegas Sphere.

Projection System and Setup

• 00:03:53 The Dome's projection system utilizes three main Christie 4K projectors and three smaller ones to achieve a combined 10K by 10K resolution image across the oddly shaped screen. This stitched-together approach was necessary as a single large projector with a fisheye lens did not provide sufficient resolution. Each large projector is a Christie D4K2560, capable of 4K 60fps and 25,000 lumens, requiring an innovative cooling solution with three dedicated 550 CFM AC fans.

Behind the Scenes Technology

• 00:06:47 The heart of the nightly shows is a Lenovo ThinkStation powered by a 12-core third-gen Threadripper processor, 128 GB of RAM, and four Nvidia Quadro P6000 GPUs with a Quadro sync card. This setup allows output to 16 displays, ensuring perfect synchronization for pre-rendered content, real-time particle effects, and Unreal Engine 5 or TouchDesigner applications. Video signals are transmitted to projectors using adapters over standard network cables, rather than HDMI.

Gaming on the Dome

• 00:09:52 An unconventional demonstration involved connecting a high-end gaming PC to the Dome's system via NDI over the network, sending a 4K ultrawide signal to the stitching computer. Despite initial concerns about latency, the experience of gaming on the massive, curved screen was unexpectedly immersive, creating a pseudo-3D effect. While not the intended content, it highlighted the system's capabilities and the unique sensation of a truly massive display, even if it distorted UI elements at the extreme edges.