Interdisciplinary Fulldome Media Lab for Planetarium

Presentation theme: educational advancements in planetariums

As an educational institution, our planetarium’s primary purpose is to serve our students, while playing a secondary role as a community outreach tool. Historically, this meant supporting introductory astronomy classes and public presentations. But with the construction of a new Science Complex, we are extending the planetarium’s use beyond its traditional role into arts and media education as well. To that end, we initiated the development of an Interdisciplinary Fulldome Media Lab to allow students with different backgrounds in science, education, graphic design, and media production to collaborate on creating original content for the planetarium. In this presentation, we discuss our efforts to date, show examples of the different kinds of content developed for different audiences, how that content is featured in both our main planetarium and mobile domes alike, and how this approach has helped to increase the planetarium’s value to the University.

Image © Arena Berlin