"Wild Ride" Canyon...

"Wild Ride" Canyon sequence for the NASA Immersive Earth Project

The "Earth's Wild Ride" planetarium show is the first of several fulldome presentations being created for the NASA Immersive Earth Project. The show will premiere at the Houston Burke Baker Planetarium and then be distributed to planetariums worldwide. The final closing sequence is a fast roller coaster ride down a canyon during a torrential thunderstorm. If you would like to experience the need to grab onto your chair during an immersive fulldome show, this one's for you. The motion is designed to give the audience the thrill of flying down a canyon with a rapidly moving river just inches below their view. Near misses of lightning, falling trees, landslides, diving through tunnels, full 360 pitches and eventually a plummet over a waterfall all are part of this 3 minute sequence.

Presented as a planetarium show employing a fulldome projection format... utilizing multiple video projectors to completely fill the dome with imagery... the format allows the audience to experience an immersive view... no longer looking at a traditional screen's "framed" view, but able to look left, right, up... all around as if they were actually sitting in the environment created by the dome’s surface... complete with surround sound audio effects to finish the feeling of practically being there.

The three minute sequence took almost eight months of production time to create and the various scenes required hundreds of visual layers to give it a natural look. Using a combination of 3D, mattepaintings and particle effects, animator Tom Nypaver and painter/modeler Gerry Wagner attempted to give the viewer a real wild ride... everything except really getting wet.

Opening with a dry desert scene, a lone hawk-like bird floats high above us. We follow the bird as our view rotates and we see an anvil shaped thunderhead... lightning arching across the menacing dark cloud. We move towards the storm. Faster and faster, like like the first hill on a roller coaster, we descend into the cloud... water and hail strobbing in the electrically charged environment. The camera rotates down and chases a single drop as it falls rapidly toward Earth. The drop gets blown from side to side and the camera continues to correct and center the drop as we plummet.

We can begin to make out ground details and we see the beginnings of a canyon cut by a mighty river flow. Our drop is heading towards a lonely tree growing near the topside of the canyon wall. The drop hits a leaf on the tree and our view follows the leaf as it swoops and banks in the wind on a ride down the river. We ride the leaf over the rapids as the canyon walls rush past at alarming speed. A lightning strike fells an old tree above us and it comes crashing down nearly hitting us. We dive through a tunnel-like pass and are nearly buried by a mud slide... the wind picks up our leaf and we spin 360 degrees. The roar of the wind and the water grows and we are suddenly perched high above a waterfall and begin the stomach wrenching dive down. The view fades to black as we reach the bottom.

As the scene fades up again all is calm, the sun is shinning as we see a grasshopper contentedly chewing our battered leaf. We hear a screech from behind us then a fluttering noise as a bird dives out of nowhere, grabbing the grasshopper, leaving our leaf, and then slowly the bird glides up into the now clearing sky.

Several other animated scenes are featured in this immersive fulldome show, including subjects ranging from dinosaurs and mammoths to volcanos and asteroid strikes.

The NASA Immersive Earth Project is a five year funded program to create educational immersive planetarium shows that deal with Earth Science... Rice University's Space Institute and the Houston Museum of Natural Science are the key coordinators