AVAILABLE FORMATS: FULL DOME

Until now, astronomers have only been able to hypothesize about what Pluto looks like.  A team from the Montreal Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium went to Arizona last spring to visit the legendary Lowell Observatory and film some 360° immersive images of the historic telescope that discovered Pluto in 1930, along with some of the most beautiful skies visible from Earth.  Pluto: Chronicles of an Ex-Planet is an immersive experience telling the story of this intriguing dwarf planet that continues to fascinate us even today.

Origins of Life deals with some of the most profound questions of life science: the origins of life and the human search for life beyond Earth.

Starting with the Big Bang, in chronological order, the show deals with the prebiotic chemistry in the Universe, the formation of stars, formation of solar systems, and the first life on Earth.  Furthermore, Origins of Life covers the great extinctions as well as our search for (primitive) life beyond planet Earth.

Origins of Life is a inspirational journey through time and a celebration of life on Earth.  It features many recent discoveries related to life science, demonstrating that if there was ever a time that science made its greatest advances, it’s right now!

Join this expedition to Mars and enjoy a thrilling immersive experience.  You’ll dive into the depths of seemingly bottomless canyons and brave the violent winds that sweep across the Red Planet’s icy dunes.  Set to music by Dumas, One Day… on Mars will take you to a world that mankind, in its ongoing search for life, could well visit in just a few decades.

One of Spitz’s most popular fulldome shows, Oasis In Space, transports the audience on a startling and beautiful voyage through our universe, galaxy, and solar system in search of liquid water, a key ingredient for life on Earth.  With a proven, audience-tested story, and an original surround format musical score, Oasis In Space will delight viewers of all ages.

Join the young Charles Darwin on an adventurous voyage of exploration circumnavigating the World with the HMS Beagle.  In the 19th century in Victorian times many physical phenomena were already discovered and described by natural laws, but life’s most eloquent mechanism was still unknown: how could new species arise to replace those lost in extinction?  It was time for someone to come forth with a Naturalist explanation of this mystery of mysteries.

(AKA Egypt: Secrets of the Mummies)

Journey to the royal tombs of Egypt and explore the history of ancient Egyptian society as told through the mummies of the past.  The film follows explorers and scientists as they piece together the archeological and genetic clues of Egyptian mummies, and provides audiences with a window into the fascinating and mysterious world of the pharaohs.  To unwrap the secrets of the pharaohs is to perhaps glimpse the future of our own civilization.

Moons: Worlds of Mystery immerses you in the amazing diversity of moons and the important roles they play in shaping our solar system.

Follow in the footsteps of astronauts to our silvery Moon, then venture beyond to unfamiliar and exotic worlds.  Journey to the outer planets and their moons, and return home with newfound wonder about the dynamic and intricate solar system in which we all live.

In this short animation, the archetypal hero takes a journey through seven stages: birth, childhood, mission, labyrinth, monster, battle, and death/rebirth.  Through purely abstract, moving images, the corresponding emotional states are conveyed: calm, love, joy, surprise, fear, anger/hate, and death/rebirth, leading again to calm.  The cycles continue until the stars burn out and there is nothing left.  Minotaur was created stereoscopically in Sandde, the world’s first freehand stereoscopic 3D animation software, but is also available in 2D Dome and 360° virtual reality (VR) formats.

Travel to the microscopic world and discover some of the invisibles that feed on us and make us sick.  Lice, fleas, and mites.  Parasites such as bacteria and worms.  Enjoy them all with fascinatiny cartoon-style images.

How did life on Earth begin?  This tantalizing question forms the basis of a magnificent production by the California Academy of Sciences Morrison Planetarium.

Life: A Cosmic Story begins in a redwood forest with the sounds of wind and life.  One redwood looms larger, and as we approach its branches and enter one of its leaves, we adjust our perspective to the microscopic scale inside a cell.  We see a pared-down version of its inner workings, learning about the process of photosynthesis and the role of DNA.  This scene sets the stage for the story of life.

We then leap backward billions of years to the origin of elements themselves.  The early Universe contained mostly dark matter, which drew hydrogen and helium together to form the first stars.  The carbon and heavier elements required by living organisms came from generations of stars.

We continue our journey, diving into the Milky Way Galaxy as it was several billion years ago.  We approach a region in which stars are forming, where we encounter a protoplanetary disk surrounding our newborn Sun.  We arrive at the young Earth, splashing down in deep water to visit a hydrothermal vent and to examine the formation of organic molecules.  We then travel above a volcanic island to encounter an enriched “hot puddle” of water, in which nucleotides (building blocks of RNA and DNA) may have wrapped themselves in protective vesicles.

The show leaps forward in time, showing the movement of continents and the changing environment for life.  Finally, we reach modern Earth, circling the globe to review the evidence for the story we have heard.  Much of what we understand about evolution we have pieced together from the fossil record, but we can also reassemble evolutionary history by studying life that surrounds us today.

As we learn that all life shares a common ancestry and common chemistry, we pull away from individual images of life, and we end the show as we see their three-dimensional distribution form the double-helix strand of DNA.  The audience is left immersed inside a representation of the structure of life’s shared origins.

Two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, near the jagged tips of Norway’s crown, the sun does not set for weeks on end during the summer months, and the midnight sun bounces off fields of midsummer snow.

Sami herders call their work boazovázzi, which translates as “reindeer walker,” and that’s exactly what herders once did, following the fast-paced animals on foot or wooden skis as they sought out the best grazing grounds over hundreds of miles of terrain.

An aurora borealis is a natural light display in the sky, especially in the high latitude regions, caused by the collision of solar wind and magnetospheric charged particles with the high altitude atmosphere.

The Finnish name for the northern lights “revontulet” is associated with the arctic fox.  According to a folk tale, moonlight is reflected from the snowflakes swept up into the sky by the fox’s tail.

A fulldome show for planetariums and digital dome theaters.

Leo is an educational project about Art and Science, where two techniques are combined, puppets carved in wood and digital animation, with the aim of entertaining children and adults to awake their interest in Art and Science.  With Leo and Art we take a journey through the history of Art and learn the basics of some of its most significant moments, such as the beginning of what is meant by art, with cave paintings, the genius of Art and Science of Leonardo Da Vinci and we learn that there is not only one way to see the stars with Van Gogh.

Perseus and Andromeda is a fun-filled retelling of the tale of the beautiful but unfortunate princess Andromeda, who in divine punishment for her mother’s bragging, is sacrificed to a sea monster — and rescued by the Greek hero Perseus.

Legends of the Night Sky: Orion is the world’s first traditionally animated fulldome movie.  Legends takes an imaginative look at the stories and legends about Orion, the great hunter of the winter sky.  It’s ideal for family audiences and younger viewers.  Greek mythology will never seem the same once you’ve seen this fun-filled production from AudioVisual Imagineering and Spitz Creative Media.

This work celebrates human intuition and its capacity to image the invisible and sing the inaudible.  Immersed in the action, spectators take part in the motions of the cosmos, at once simple and complex, always extraordinarily rich.  In this voyage through the world of waves (whose apt title is the Greek word for “wave”), light and sound envelop us and transport us from the infinitely small to the infinitely large — emphasizing, in the middle, the locus of living things.

The vastness of our planet’s oceans guards unimaginable secrets. One of its most precious is Kaluoka’hina, the enchanted reef whose magic protects it against humans finding it.

Embark on a journey back in time and across the Solar System, following the paths of asteroids and comets that have collided with Earth—and those that roam far from home.  These ancient objects travel billions of years before reaching Earth, and their impact can be so powerful that just one collision can change the course of life on our planet.

Scientists aren’t waiting for asteroids and comets to come to us to learn more about them — get an up-close look at spacecraft sent to rocky asteroids and icy comets to collect invaluable data.  You’ll follow the trek of the Chelyabinsk meteor as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2013 and visualize major shifts in the history of the Solar System billions of years in the making—and all in under an hour.

High above the majestic central California coast rises an enchanted castle, a special place created from the dreams of one man, William Randolph Hearst.  His vision was inspired by his many trips to Europe’s finest castles.  From this unique blend of European influence rose an architectural masterpiece which Hearst furnished with priceless art treasures from around the world.  Hearst Castle: Building the Dream will captivate audiences with Europe’s spectacular architectural wonders, the foundation for the dream that became Hearst Castle.

Living networks connect and support life forms large and small — from colonies of tiny microbes and populations of massive whales to ever-expanding human societies.

In the California Academy of Sciences’ 2015 original planetarium show, Habitat Earth, discover what it means to live in today’s connected world.

Through stunning visualizations of the natural world, dive below the ocean’s surface to explore the dynamic relationships found in kelp forest ecosystems, travel beneath the forest floor to see how Earth’s tallest trees rely on tiny fungi to survive, and journey to new heights to witness the intricate intersection between human and ecological networks.

Narrated by actor Frances McDormand, this 2015 show from the Morrison Planetarium features stunning visualizations of both biological and human-built networks (and of how they intersect), taking show-goers on an incredible, immersive journey through the interconnectedness of life on Earth.

“In Habitat Earth,” says Ryan Wyatt, Director of Morrison Planetarium, “we’re advancing the boundaries of traditional planetarium content, which focuses primarily on astronomy and space.”  Instead of looking solely to the stars, the Morrison team is using advanced digital tools and scientific data to tell stories that are uniquely Earth-focused.

The show details the ways humans fit into this ever evolving story of connection.  And along the way, audiences will learn more about what we can do to ensure that our cohabitation with the natural world leaves a healthy, sustainable planet for generations to come.