Salt Lake City, UT, USA — At the 2014 IMERSA Summit in March, key stakeholders in specialty cinema discussed the convergence taking place between giant-screen film domes and digital dome theaters (aka fulldome theaters, or digital planetariums). The dialog moved representatives of leading fulldome system providers Sky-Skan, SCISS and Evans & Sutherland to form a new special interest group: AFDI, the Association of Fulldome Innovators.
Operating under the auspices and government of IMERSA, AFDI supports community-wide, professional standards to facilitate convergence of film domes and digital domes, and move the immersive dome medium forward. During the IMERSA Summit, AFDI held its first meeting to plan for the future and welcomed RSA Cosmos as its fourth founding member. AFDI sees itself as a similar organization to SMPTE.
Representatives from other digital planetarium vendors including Goto, Konica-Minolta, and Zeiss have also stepped up to join the AFDI, providing a strong base of support among the leading equipment manufacturers for permanent theaters in the digital planetarium community. The AFDI encourages other interested companies to explore AFDI membership.
“We would like to invite producers, artists, portable planetarium vendors, and all interested members of the community to participate in the organization,” says Michael Daut, Director of Show Production/Marketing, Evans & Sutherland Digital Theater and AFDI Communications Officer. (pictured at left)
To date, the AFDI has defined two key standards for the community:
- –Metadata standards for fulldome show delivery
- –A common 2K fisheye video standard that all fulldome systems can share to facilitate wide distribution of show previews and trailers.
The specifics of these standards are published to the AFDI website: www.domestandards.org.
Links to AFDI founding member companies
Evans & Sutherland – www.es.com
RSA Cosmos – www.rsacosmos.com/en
SCISS – sciss.se