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Omnimax

computer.rip

201 pointsaberoham52 comments

I couldn't get an email or post to work correctly to the author, so hoping they find this.

Thank you to the shout out to my father, Preston Fleet, for his work on developing Omnimax and everything is the article is factually correct. He died young after also building Fotomat and WD40 (and funding the Cabaret movie, for which he shared an Oscar). He shied away from the spotlight and named everything after his contributors because he was kind. And a totally shock the author knew about his presidency at the American Theatre Organ Society, which my mother followed after his death. Unfortunate selfish to say in a public forum, but really just want to thank the article's author in some way

Thanks! email to me@computer.rip should work, sorry if it has given you trouble. Theater organs are one of my weird little interests, so maybe it's a leap but when I saw a tangential mention that Preston Fleet had been a theater organist some of the dramatic design features of many Omnimax theaters (like the glass-walled projection rooms and displaying the speakers in the preshow) made more sense to me. They're similar to the way many theater organs were installed, especially as they started to become such a niche instrument.

The Omnimax theatre at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal is worth the trip if you're in the area. They still show the "wormhole" and show off the speaker stacks outside the dome during the pre-show.

Wow, I thought for sure they would have retired it by now. I remember having a birthday party there when I was a kid (90 or 91?) and thinking that it was the coolest thing ever. It made up for them not moving the planetarium from their old location when they moved the museum to Union Terminal, which I (at 9) recall making me really sad.

It has had a digital retrofit (no more giant reels of film paying-out into the projector to watch while in line for the next show) but is otherwise pretty much unchanged.

We took a "behind the scenes" your years ago and got to see the projection dome from the outside. That was pretty freaky.

I’ve been to that one many times, and Union Terminal alone is worth the trip.

I was surprised to see a mention of the Carnegie Science Center's Omnimax and the year 1978 -- my recollection was that this theater didn't open until I was both alive and cognizant enough of the world around me to remember it.

That seems consistent with this announcement from 2017 that the theater was going to close (citing a quarter century): https://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/rangos-omnimax-theater-to...

I couldn't find any press covering it from 1978, although this directory of IMAX/Omnimax theaters from 1992 matches my recollection of it opening in ~1991.

I think you're right, I mixed up some different locations. Here's the cool thing: while I was checking that against newspaper archives I happened to run across an older version of an illustration I saw used in the '90s, but the older version has a more complete caption! It confirms that the Science Museum of Minnesota installation was at least planned to have a Spitz STS like the Fleet. I'll see if I can tell if it was ever installed or not. I've been unsure of whether or not the Fleet was the only example of a combined Omnimax/planetarium.

The same illustration appeared with announcements of some other Omnimax theaters, but I suspect it had just been copied from the Minnesota design without paying much attention. The captions never mention the STS.

However, the side control booth located about halfway up the house, which is present in all of the Omnimax theaters where I've been able to check, is labeled as the "Planetarium console." This could explain the curiosity of the '90s Omnimax theaters having two different control booths. It seems odd to keep that feature without the planetarium projector.

I spent a great deal of time at Reuben H. Fleet as a kid growing up in San Diego, playing in the science museum and watching whatever Omnimax movie was on. Didn't matter what it was, they were almost always great eye candy. Even saw, later, a Pink Floyd-themed laser light show projected on the dome. Never failed to impress.

The planetarium at the University of Arizona used to run the Pink Floyd show weekly. Seems like they have now added others to their program.

>> https://flandrau.org/explore/laser-light-music-nights

Hey, me too! SMB/OB/PL.

I also grew up in San Diego with an intimate connection to Balboa Park and the Reuben H. Fleet. Watched the original Aerospace Museum burn down; quite a warm night on the Prado.

The Fleet was where I played the Coordination Game with 2 hand controls and 2 pedals for my feet, old incandescent bulbs behind colored cels to match up simultaneously. I think I scored over 30.

The Fleet was where I took science classes in summertime. We learned how to make “Oobleck” and we used Apple ][ computers. It was where I found my first blinking cursor. I couldn’t type; I couldn’t find “g” on a Qwerty!

Fleet had the Cloud Chamber and Whisper Dishes and the big Periscope that must’ve got moved 5 times??? There was the orbital simulator where you’d roll balls down a black conical incline, and someone else threw in a coin?

We watched Carl Sagan do stuff and Jacques Cousteau. None of the IMAX films had a memorable name or stars, but they were all documentaries with obligatory aerial shots on the geodesic dome.

One science thing not in the Fleet science center but across the Prado, just as near the giant fountain: "The Nat" (San Diego Natural History Museum) hosted a giant Foucault Pendulum, 3+ stories high, toppling "dominoes" all day every day, to tell us the time!

Very late in time, it must've been ca. 2005 -- Mythbusters Live was on tour and they made an appearance at the Fleet. So it was Kari Byron and that Japanese guy who's dead now, and someone else like, I don't know, all my attention and amorous energy was focused on Kari, OK? And they had a panel discussion and then a live Meet & Greet and we posed for a photo while Mythbusters characters posed in real life next to us. And they autographed my photo I think. They had a full Mythbusters-themed display at the Fleet during that time, with hands-on.

Hands-on is the name of the game at the Fleet. You touch it! It moves! You respond! Der Blïnkënlīghts! It's a museum and a science center!

I purchased and ate genuine Astronaut Ice Cream (freeze dried) from the gift shop. A hologram sheet that was a real laser-encoded, white-light 3D hologram of a woman blowing a kiss! The Fleet Gift Shop had the best science toys and the best hard-science experiments! Reality-based, evidence-based entertainment! ("Edu-tainment"???)

The Fleet had one or two little side theaters where they would hold lectures and in-person appearances. We were rarely privileged to peek in, or much less sit in there; it seemed like a VIP experience. But they definitely had a screen and a lectern and awesome sciency science.

I believe that Tijuana eventually built their own IMAX attraction theater across the international border. You could go to smelly polluted Mexico and have your stupid turistic IMAX show. But OMNIMAX was different and something uniquely special. And plenty of mojados in San Diego proper. With clean air and crystal clear waters in the Coronado bay!

I never saw the Pink Floyd show!!! You must be mentally ill to purchase a ticket and I was diagnosed late. But the Pink Floyd Laser Show was the only laser show and it was a huge thing in the 1980s! It was like Grateful Dead jams for nerds!

It might seem a little bit deceptive that an attraction called the Sphere does not quite pull off even a hemisphere of "payload," but the same compromise has been reached by most dome theaters.

This paragraph is bizarre to me, framed from a presumably extremely niche "Sphere-as-dome-theater" perspective. I would think that, for most people, the Sphere is the exterior part and it delivers and is every bit as innovative as anyone who has seen a picture of it would say. I don't understand the effort to downplay that and say "oh forget that part it's actually just a not-even-spherical dome theater."

A lot of people I know assumed that the Las Vegas Sphere interior screen was on the "other side" of the exterior dome. They were surprised when I showed them this image: https://i0.wp.com/alia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/sph...

I was certainly surprised when I saw images of the inside, and upon reflection wasn't sure exactly what I had had in mind or how that would have worked with the realities of infrastructure needs for a venue like that.

But still, it feels weird to express a sentiment of "well it didn't really live up to the sphere thing" while dismissing the massive obvious spherical component that was the innovative work of engineering/tech/art/whatever.

> "well it didn't really live up to the sphere thing"

I never thought it didn't live up to being a Sphere. The outside is definitely a big ass sphere of impressive proportions. To me, that impressive size (for whatever it's worth) never relied on the interior screen also being that size.

Having visited it, I found the exterior even more impressive when standing near it. Aerial photos don't really convey just how damn big the thing is due to the frame of reference being nearby Vegas casino buildings. Vegas casino towers tend to be larger than they look and farther apart than one might assume.

However, on watching their demo movie Postcards From Earth, I now think the Sphere is a poor venue for theatrical story-telling due to poor contrast, self-illumination and being too big and too wide. The size and edge-to-edge arc are so extreme they introduce challenges which significantly reduce the quality of any theatrical presentation. Basically they went overboard on maximizing the 'curb-appeal' first-impact of building. So much so, they basically fucked any chance of it ever being a high-quality venue for wide format movies. I'd much rather see a wide format movie on an Omnimax screen than the Sphere.

That's kind of Vegas in a nutshell, right? It's first and foremost about superficial glitz and glamour. Nothing wrong with that really, and they sure are good at it.

I saw Eagles at Sphere with my family (part of the fun of that trip was realizing that both of those entities explicitly [perhaps vehemently] do not use an article in the name and thus that is grammatically correct).

I agree that it is a very strange venue that doesn't seem to know what audience it's going for. Band culture, and generally the types of acts that play to a seated crowd, is more about the performance than over-the-top and overwhelming visual stimuli. Dance music culture, the people that love that, prefers a flat open dancefloor. As you mention, it's not really built for moviegoers either. But it is still a really impressive and enjoyable experience and I hope they can figure it out.

(And just be clear, my paraphrase that you quoted was referring to the original article)

Given the expense of running a proper Omnimax theater and the lack of new content to keep it going, it seems like the only way Omnimax can be properly preserved in the long term is through VR.

Great article! Thanks for sharing your research into the history of these super interesting theaters and projection systems.

There is something I've wondered about though:

> While far from inexpensive, digital projection systems are now able to match the quality of Omnimax projection.

Are they really? The St Louis Science Center Omnimax was switched from the 70mm film system to "laser 4k" digital projection in 2019. I've only been to one show but it didn't seem particularly sharp, with large clearly visible pixels. It was very bright, with high contrast, though.

4k seems like a pretty low resolution for such a large screen?

This is definitely an area for debate. I've seen the physical resolution of a 70/15 film frame estimated at 70MP, which is obviously a lot more than the ~8MP of 4k. The MP comparisons between film and digital are a little iffy though, and digital ought to be sharper within the limitations of that resolution than film. Ultimately it comes down to marketing but, having not had a direct comparison, I would still expect 70mm to look better than a digital projection system.

I think that digital LED domes might beat film because of the excellent light output and color reproduction, but I guess I'll have to shell out for the Sphere to find out as there are very few of that size.

I did some scanning for Universal. Depending on how the image is framed, you can usually just squeeze 4K from 35mm. The 70mm I had I easily pulled 8K from and I'm pretty sure I could have gone to 10K.

I thought it was 8k rather than 4k that was generally considered to be roughly equivalent to IMAX?

Fascinating article! I have many fond childhood memories of the IMAX (I guess Omnimax? Although I’ve never heard it called that) dome theater at the Tech Museum in San Jose. I probably saw “Everest” half a dozen times.

I’m also slightly embarrassed to just now learn that the opening sequence where the speakers and backing structure for the screen are shown looked so real because…it was. They weren’t projecting an image, just turning on lights so you could see back through the perforated metal screen!

So fun fact: For many years I thought IMAX was Omnimax. I had a very bad experience in an Omnimax theater when I was younger (I found it extremely disorienting) and avoided pretty much all IMAX showings for years. I forget how I found out IMAX screens were flat...

I miss the Omnimax they had at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. They closed it during the pandemic and it never reopened.

I sort of wonder how many of them had this exact fate - the Ft Worth Texas one was in the exact same situation. My understanding is that both parts to maintain the projection system and people with the knowledge to operate it were getting very rare, and the people largely retired when the pandemic closed the theater. Since a lot of the Omnimax screens were build during a similar range of time and would have had similar challenges, I wonder if that fate was common.

(luckily, the Ft Worth theater specifically was converted to an LED screen and recently reopened)

Was really special seeing Interstellar on that screen.

> Fortuitously, almost simultaneously the Multiscreen Corporation was .. > IMAX made an obvious basis for a high-resolution projection system, and so the then-named IMAX Corporation was added ...

I got confused about the name of the company and even Wikipedia seems to be very inconsistent about it [1].

What exactly was it called in 1960s and 70s, "Multiscreen Corporation" or "IMAX Corporation"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX_Corporation:

It says:

> IMAX is a Canadian corporation that is based in Mississauga, Ontario. The company was founded in 1967 when three filmmakers—Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor and Robert Kerr—incorporated IMAX Corporation

No mention of "Multiscreen Corporation" other than in the infobox.

I agree that the article text could be clearer. As I understand it, it was originally incorporated as Multiscreen Corporation (probably to work on some kind of multi-projector format which were in vogue at the time) and then renamed to IMAX Corporation after the success of the IMAX system at the 1970 Expo.

I went to Space Camp in Huntsville in '89 or so. One of the perks was a daily showing at their Omnimax theater. Felt absolutely incredible at the time. The most memorable moment was a scene where they filmed the Space Shuttle tower escape system--basically a basket on a zipline that goes into a sand pit. Everyone in the theater instinctively leapt forward when the basket hit the sand. The difference, I suppose, is that the screen filled your peripheral vision as well. I didn't experience the same level of immersiveness until VR, much later on.

Growing up in Cincinnati, the Omnimax at the museum center was a huge influence. The light tunnel intro (one of many adapted from the Graphic Films Corporation logo [1]) absolutely blew my mind and gave me a lifelong obsession with computer graphics.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-09F87C6Ps

You probably already know this, but the light tunnel intro wasn't computer graphic imagery. It was created using optical effects generally referred to as slit scan. The same technique was used to create the star gate sequence at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"Back to the Future: The Ride" was also an Omnimax dome system, but with moving platforms instead of seats. It was installed in 3 locations, with 2 screens at each, so a total of 6 screens.

I'm not sure if any later similar rides used a similar system, (for example Disney's Soarin') or if they are new enough to be digital from the start.

Soarin’ (in California and Florida, at least) originally used IMAX film projectors and OMNIMAX-style dome screens; it was updated to digital at around the same time as the ride film changed to the current “Soarin’ around the World” in 2016 (plus or minus a year; I think the digital conversion might’ve been a bit earlier in California)

It's not at all a similar ride, but Epcot Center's Horizons (at Walt Disney World) used two Omnimax screens back to back as part of a dark ride. There's a map showing what that looked like here: https://parklore.com/main/horizons/3/

I forgot that it was Omnimax. I did some test scans of the 70mm reel from that ride at one point. They replaced it with Simpsons, which I believe reused the dome, but was probably digital projection I would imagine.

We had an Omnimax theatre in Vancouver, BC, and I always loved going to it as a kid. The little introduction before any feature was a highlight where they showed off the capabilities and turned on the lights behind the screen at each speaker so the audience could actually see where the sound was coming from.

Here, here, and here.

I remember going to an Omnimax in Seattle on a school trip in 1987, they were showing (thank you Internet) "Block-buster - clips from a helicopter ride around Seattle’s Space Needle, a motorcycle pursuit through downtown Atlanta, Georgia, a ride through the Kamakazi curve of the Orient Express roller coaster at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, Missouri, and a speeding bobsled at Lake Placid." Anyway, it made us all very queasy!

This was a great article!

I saw "To Fly!" for the first time at the Smithsonian Air and Space Dulles location (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) on their IMAX screen two years ago. Definitely a film of its moment, and I can see how that influenced future science film documentaries.

My dad worked for Spitz doing Omnimax installations and planetariums, but I don't know any of the details. I would assume this was probably the late 70s or early 80s.

Awesome article. I have fond FOND memories of all of these things from MSI Chicago growing up. It was an epic experience to see such a film.

I grew up outside of Boston and as a kid we went to the Museum of Science's Omnimax dome quite a few times.

As I grew up, I started seeing/hearing about IMAX movies, and didn't realize they were different until I went to one in another part of the country. I was very excited to go, as it had been a long time since I had been to an Omnimax.

I was pretty confused and disappointed, which is a weird reaction to have the first time in an IMAX theater. "It's just a big screen... Where's the dome?"

"I grew up just a few blocks from here."

"Who put the bomp in the bomp sha bomp!"

I too had a similar reaction the first time I saw an imax.

OMG, I had totally forgotten about the Leonard Nimoy intro!!

I read your response and was like, "Huh?", then it hit me. That's easily a 30 year old memory sitting in deep storage. I haven't been there, or thought about it since college. The human brain is amazing.

And since we live in the future, I can easily find a clip of it online:

https://youtu.be/MHK2-BVfUzs

The helicopter intro was the best.

"These people wanna see a lobstah!"

We had a proper IMAX in my home town which was knocked down partly due to locals complaining its beach-front location was making it an eyesore. I try to see any new 15/70 IMAX films (essentially, anything by Christopher Nolan) at the London BFI, one of only three screens left in the UK.

First large format system I experience was Omnimax in Fort Worth in the 80's. Much more immersive than IMAX. Actually, the Apple Vision Pro movies reminds me of that experience now.

So glad to see the mention of "The Dream Is Alive." I love the movie, but the soundtrack has haunted me for years. Excellent and informative article.

Thanks for this, well written

I grew up going to the Omnimax theatre at the Ontario Science Centre; that image of the giant projector going up the angled elevator is a very familiar sight. I loved the little short films they showed there, but it's obvious it was an incredibly bulky and obtuse format that was unlikely to be of much competition against digital alternatives.

Sadly the OSC as a whole is now being demolished after years of under-investment and mismanagement, and the Cinesphere (IMAX) at Ontario Place is likewise in dire straits.

Who put the bomp…

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