Newbie Q about planetarium warping

[Mark_Cartagine]

Hello to everyone,

Our planetarium (Spitz 512, 30-ft diameter, 60-seat) is in the process of being upgraded to digital, using the mirrordome/sphemir technology.

I am really impressed with Celestia, and would love to make it available to instructors so they can do tours, etc., in real time for their astronomy students.

This means we would need to have a dual display system, where the operatir sees a 'proper' image on the screen, while a warped, full-dome image is sent to the projectors. This would have to happen in real time (whew!)

I understand that some people are working on making Celestia warpable, but I haven't found any recent topics on the issue.

Is this still being worked on? If so, we'd be happy to volunteer the planetarium for tests!

Thanks for any info on this!

Mark

[mjoubert]

Mark,

I'm not really sure of my answer, but I think the dual display does not depend on Celestia or any other application but on your display card/system (like when you use a video projector with a laptop).

Anyway, please find a solution to make Celestia available in your dome...

Mathieu

[BobHegwood]

Mark,

Look to this thread for a bit more help...

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10718

It ain't much, but perhaps you guys could get together.

Thanks, Bob

[chris]

Hello to everyone,

Our planetarium (Spitz 512, 30-ft diameter, 60-seat) is in the process of being upgraded to digital, using the mirrordome/sphemir technology.

I am really impressed with Celestia, and would love to make it available to instructors so they can do tours, etc., in real time for their astronomy students.

This means we would need to have a dual display system, where the operatir sees a 'proper' image on the screen, while a warped, full-dome image is sent to the projectors. This would have to happen in real time (whew!)

I understand that some people are working on making Celestia warpable, but I haven't found any recent topics on the issue.

Is this still being worked on? If so, we'd be happy to volunteer the planetarium for tests!

Thanks for any info on this!

This is a frequent request, but unfortunately I don't know of any work being done to adapt Celestia for planetarium projectors. An easy and flexible approach is to have Celestia render multiple views to the faces of a cube map and then use a shader to warp the image in whatever way is appropriate for the particular projector configuration.

--Chris

[Mark_Cartagine]

Thank you all for the input. Pity that Swinburne wants several thousand AUD for their version of Celestia, otherwise we'd go with them.

Chris, I like the idea for making movies and the like; unfortunately, I don't think it's practical for real-time shows, which is what we'd really like.