Newton's Cannon

So first of all, I’m going to try to write a little more here. It’s been a while. The pandemic aftermath has kept me away from much production work, but there are other planetarium things to talk about.

I ran across some posted videos from the 2017 Pleiades National Planetarium Conference, and found my joint talk with my extrovert friend Patty Seaton, titled The Power of Introverts in Your (Planetarium) Classroom. I hadn’t seen it in a while.

Introvert kids may just clam up during activities that reward group participation. It’s important that teachers don’t mistake that reaction for a lack of interest or engagement. Me, I’m an off-the-scale introvert, and I could think of nobody better than Patty to team up with to talk about these introverts and extroverts, and how they may react differently in a classroom setting.

Since Patty is in a school system dome and I’m at a science center with a tight schedule and a large tourist crowd, she’s in a better position to put some of her tips into practice. This is a good reminder to me, though, to give the quiet kids a chance.

Anyhow, I almost never like watching or hearing myself talk. I especially didn’t like seeing myself staring into my iPad for notes – but the truth is this would have been a really difficult (and personal) topic for me to talk about without notes. At least not without a lot of practice and, frankly, memorization. It would have been less fun.

Back in 2014 I posted an After Effects project for making scrolling credits in fulldome – it required the Dome View Assembler plugin from E&S.

These days, with the VR tools that come with AE, the plugin is no longer needed. Check out the new template here!

Put whatever content you want in the ‘credits’ comp, and change its dimensions if you need it to be taller or shorter.

The ‘fulldome’ comp has a ‘scroll control’ slider. 0% is the top of the credits comp just below the cove line. 100% is the bottom of the credits comp just above the cove line. Keep increasing the scroll control past 100% to keep the credits flying upward.

New! And (probably?) improved!

DomePath is a tool to assist animation with the E&S Virtual Projector plugin for After Effects. Read more and download here.

This version installs in a different way than previously, to get around some limitations of the Virtual Projector plugin. Please try it out and send me an email on how it goes – especially if you have had trouble in the past.

Check this out: Thomas from the Czech Republic wrote me with his new app (his first!) that takes care of downloading Google Streetview images, all without the rigamarole of everything I wrote up a few years ago. Find your pan at istreetview.com, then click “Download 360°” to download the app for Mac or Windows.

From Adler Planetarium, via Dome-L, an open source approach to captioning/subtitling in the dome. Guests can, using their own mobile device, access a web page that displays lines of text at the appropriate time intervals.

A ‘start’ button has to be pressed in time with the beginning of the show. i bet some playback systems, could, with some work, play back text to a web page right in time with the show.