24 November 2017
TRY Before You BUY — Special Offer
Are you thinking of buying a traditional show license, but you aren't sure about the major budget outlay? Why not rent the show from FULLDOME OnDemand to try it out?
Bring in some test audiences — your friends, supporters, administrators.
Then, should you decide to purchase the long-term license from us, we'll credit the rental fees you paid for the show!
If you decide not to, you'll only be out the rental fee instead of hundreds or thousands of dollars!
Applies only to LNP-created shows displaying our "TRY Before You BUY" icon.
16 October 2017
New show from Creative Planet!
EXPLORE
Our future on Mars depends on discoveries from the past!
Have you ever wondered how our modern spacecraft can navigate quickly and accurate to Earth orbit and beyond? Learn how it all works in EXPLORE, a compelling new immersive experience.
Revolving around the story of a future Mars colonization, through the discoveries of Johannes Kepler's laws of motion, this fulldome show is created by the executive producer of Dream to Fly. Narrated by British voiceover Philip Banks, it features script contributions by Loch Ness Productions's own Carolyn Collins Petersen and British planetarian Dr. Jenny Shipway. It's a beautifully visualized educational trip through the history of astronomy and the space age. We're pleased to make this show available as part of our ever-growing library of fulldome content!
Explore more info, previews and online ordering here!
And for instant gratification, you can rent the show for 72 hours, using our FULLDOME OnDemand service.
3 June 2017
Losing the Dark now available in Lithuanian 
That makes a total of 21 languages for the free-to-download show about light pollution we created for the International Dark-Sky Association in 2013.
You can download this latest translation, in fulldome and flat-screen versions!
14 April 2017
Losing the Dark now available in Croatian 
That makes a total of 20 languages for the free-to-download show about light pollution we created for the International Dark-Sky Association in 2013.
You can download this latest translation, in fulldome and flat-screen versions!
27 March 2017
New show from Adler Planetarium!
Planet Nine
Join the Hunt for a Possible Planet!
Planet Nine, the latest fulldome show from Adler Planetarium, gives audiences an inside look at the painstaking process of planet-searching, as told by CalTech's Mike Brown, discoverer of Eris and Haumea. Throughout this fascinating show, Brown talks about unusual orbits and describes nights of painstaking robotic searches for new planets. His is a story of modern planet-detecting techniques that have uncovered many new worlds out beyond Neptune.
Discoveries of new worlds "out there" also give insight into their distances, orbits, and compositions. In addition, those orbits give intriguing clues to the existence of what may be a very large, so-far-undiscovered world deep in the Kuiper Belt.
Join in this fascinating tale of observation, discovery, and analysis — and hear firsthand about the life of a modern planet hunter searching out his prey.
Start your hunt for more info, previews and online ordering here!
And for instant gratification, you can rent the show for 72 hours, using our FULLDOME OnDemand service.
3 March 2017
New reference article posted...
Feeding Fulldome to the Masses
Tradition has it that planetarium dome operators purchase their show content with long term licensing. But that may be a fading or certainly evolving paradigm. New forms of distribution have entered the scene, and the rise of virtual reality adds new wrinkles to the business model envisioned by producers, distributors and theaters alike.
In this presentation, we discuss some of what we've learned bringing new paradigms — ready or not — to the fulldome world.
Web adaptation from our talk at the February 2017 IMERSA Summit
2 January 2017
Now even lower...
New simplified pricing for Starlight
You'll find our "T-shirt size" pricing model in play for Melbourne Planetarium's inspirational, educational fulldome experience.
1 January 2017
For Web browsers and headsets...
New 360° video trailers to preview!
At Loch Ness Productions, 2016 was another successful year of licensing and marketing for fulldome shows. Now we're pursuing exciting new efforts for 2017 — notably in the VR realm, and how fulldome producers might take advantage of this intriguing space.
Creating a Virtual Dome Space for Previews
By now, everyone is familiar with 360-degree spherical videos. You've played with them on Facebook and YouTube. Looking around the inside of a sphere (by dragging a cursor onscreen, or spinning in your chair on mobile) — it's rather like being inside a planetarium. We think spherical videos work better than conventional flat screens to illustrate how shows look in a fulldome theater.
So we've re-made all the online preview trailers in our distribution catalog in spherical video form, adding to the flat-screen and fisheye versions already posted. Surf over to any Previews page (like Season of Light) and check out the new 360-degree videos!
As you can see, we've made a "VR Dome Theater" — with a virtual seating platform to fill the bottom half of the sphere, while the dome show plays on the top half. When these videos are opened in the YouTube app on mobile or iOS devices, not only can they be viewed by pivoting in your chair, but you can also engage split-screen mode and watch them using VR headsets such as Google Cardboard.
These new trailers are just part of the service we're happy to provide as fulldome show distributors.
What's Next? The VR Dome Theater!
So, why not take the next step and put actual show content that space? It's just a longer render to go from making trailers to making full-length shows in spherical 360 video.
We've established VRDomeTheater.com as a new LNP domain, a site where we can offer fulldome shows for VR. We've started with LNP's own shows first, and simple downloads, for playback on users' VR headsets. On-demand streaming will be more of a challenge, as 4K VR requires a lot of Internet bandwidth. We're in discussions with our producer partners to make their shows available as VR downloads too. Stay tuned!
Yes, VR is a complete reversal of what the medium of fulldome shows has been in the past. In goggles and headsets, the dome show experience goes from a group audience to a personal, individual one. Times change, and we're interested in exploring this new space to bring fulldome content to more viewers.
We look forward to serving you in more novel ways in the future!
2016
Here's last year's news, if you haven't been here for a while and want to catch up.
Mark C. Petersen, webmaster
