Omnimax

Summary

>>> 2025-06-08 Omnimax (PDF) In a previous life, I worked for a location-based entertainment company, part of a huge team of people developing a location for Las Vegas, Nevada. It was COVID, a rough time for location-based anything, and things were delayed more than usual. Coworkers paid a lot of attention to another upcoming Las Vegas attraction, one with a vastly larger budget but still struggling to make schedule: the MSG (Madison Square Garden) Sphere. I will set aside jokes about it being a square sphere, but they were perhaps one of the reasons that it underwent a pre-launch rebranding to merely the Sphere. If you are not familiar, the Sphere is a theater and venue in Las Vegas. While it's know mostly for the video display on the outside, that's just marketing for the inside: a digital dome theater, with seating at a roughly 45 degree stadium layout facing a near hemisphere of video displays. It is a "near" hemisphere because the lower section is truncated to allow a flat floor, which serves as a stage for events but is also a practical architectural decision to avoid completely unsalable front rows. 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. While the use of digital display technology is flashy, especially on the exterior, the Sphere is not quite the innovation that it presents itself as. It is just a continuation of a long tradition of dome theaters. Only time will tell, but the financial difficulties of the Sphere suggest that follows the tradition faithfully: towards commercial failure. You could make an argument that the dome theater is hundreds of years old, but I will omit it. Things really started developing, at least in our modern tradition of domes, with the 1923 introduction of the Zeiss planetarium projector. Zeiss projectors and their siblings used a complex optical and mechanical design to project ...