[HN Gopher] Omnimax
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Omnimax
Author : aberoham
Score : 195 points
Date : 2025-06-08 20:41 UTC (1 days ago)
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| vFunct wrote:
| 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.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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?"
| mschulkind wrote:
| "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.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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
| flymasterv wrote:
| The helicopter intro was the best.
| app wrote:
| "These people wanna see a lobstah!"
| classichasclass wrote:
| 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.
| latchkey wrote:
| Hey, me too! SMB/OB/PL.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| 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
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| 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 Blinkenlights!_ 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!
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I miss the Omnimax they had at the Franklin Institute in
| Philadelphia. They closed it during the pandemic and it never
| reopened.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Was really special seeing Interstellar on that screen.
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| 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)
| jsolson wrote:
| 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.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I've been to that one many times, and Union Terminal alone is
| worth the trip.
| paulv wrote:
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| ckmiller wrote:
| 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
| mrandish wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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...
| SyzygyRhythm wrote:
| 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.
| flymasterv wrote:
| Who put the bomp...
| clhodapp wrote:
| 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.
| bythreads wrote:
| Thanks for this, well written
| Xorakios wrote:
| 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
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| jrowen wrote:
| _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."
| mrandish wrote:
| 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...
| jrowen wrote:
| 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.
| necubi wrote:
| 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!
| themadturk wrote:
| 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.
| pgib wrote:
| 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.
| srejk wrote:
| Here, here, and here.
| empressplay wrote:
| 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!
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > 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.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| joelccr wrote:
| 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.
| rjmunro wrote:
| "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.
| JonathonW wrote:
| 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)
| jefflinwood wrote:
| 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.
| dmm wrote:
| 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?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| I thought it was 8k rather than 4k that was generally
| considered to be roughly equivalent to IMAX?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| sailfast wrote:
| 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.
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