The Earth Theater is located at the Carnegie Museum
of Natural History. The screen of the theater spans 210
degrees and stands around 10 feet high on a 30 degree angle
in order to try to embrace the whole peripheral vision of
the human eye.
One of the unique things about the theater is that it
is built mostly with off the shelf products. Instead of
having a special projector, the theater is run by 5 ordinary
video projectors and by 5 personal computers. Each of the
fiive computers takes one part of a broken image of a whole
image and runs it into each projector which projects it
onto the screen to form the whole image again.
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Inside
the Earth Theater of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
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Layout
of the screen and the seats in the Earth Theater
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Since the screen is arched instead of being flat, the
problem of having 5 projectors project on the screenresults
into having the images overlap onto each other since they
would intersect at certain areas. To get around this problem,
each video or image is run through a special proprietary
program of SkySkan which breaks the images into 5 parts
and have the areas of intersection blend into each other.
Since the video or image has to be ran through the program
before being projected onto the screen in order to blend
seamlessly with each other, the video or image
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