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 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!
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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
We took a "behind the scenes" your years ago and got to see the projection dome from the outside. That was pretty freaky.
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.
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.
>> https://flandrau.org/explore/laser-light-music-nights
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!
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."
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.
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?
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’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!