Ever wonder what it would be like to fly to Mars? NASA – and others – have their sights set on the Red Planet and they’re building the technology to get us there! Destination Mars: The New Frontier gives you an up-close look at humanity’s most epic endeavor.

Explore the work being done around the globe to help make the dream of getting humans to Mars a reality. Fly through the International Space Station, where astronauts are already living and working in space, and follow the rockets and vehicles that will take humans beyond the Moon and, one day, all the way to Mars! Travel along as we imagine this remarkable journey.

Narrated by former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison and Emmy-award winning actor Keith David. Includes original music by Claudio Ragazzi, a Grammy Award-winning professor at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

• Running time is 30 minutes.
• Available for unidirectional and concentric dome formats.
• Suitable for family audiences and school groups. Includes a comprehensive educator’s guide.
• Distributed by Sky-Skan, Spitz, K2 Studios, and Loch Ness Productions.

This material is based upon work supported by NASA under grant number NNX16AM21G. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the Museum of Science, Boston and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

In recent years, the 3D industry went from very little support of fisheye rendering and now every modern render engine fully embraces it. I think we can thank the rise of VR for helping to shine a light on immersive production.

We recently had a chance to upgrade the render engine that we use in Maya for producing our fulldome shows. We were also able to add some computers to our old 10-node render farm. Many thanks to the Charles Hayden Foundation for the grant that made this vital tech leap possible.

With the recent introduction of GPU render engines, things are a bit more convoluted when considered alongside CPU render engines. Yet each render engine is unique and excels at different aspects, so it makes comparing them tricky work.

And so I thought it would be useful to hear from the fulldome community…

Continue reading →

In producing From Dream to Discovery: Inside NASA we made the exciting but perilous decision to include the New Horizons mission within our story. So we made an early bet that the mission would be a success…

As you well know, New Horizons has given us an amazing close-up look at Pluto. And so we are excited to announce that we have updated the show to include the latest real images of Pluto and Charon!