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Jump to Stereoscopic 3D Related Questions

Is Mediawarp only suitable for planetariums and dome theatres ?

No, Mediawarp is also suitable for museums, science centres or any public venue where flat screen content needs to be managed and projected using either 2D or stereoscopic 3D technology.

Will the software warp my fisheye movies in real-time so that the output is suitable for a mirror based planetarium ?

Yes, the Mediawarp software is designed to warp-on-the-fly in real-time so that your fisheye movies can be played on a Windows PC without having to pre-warp them. A range of warp meshes are included so that you can switch between a range of projector resolutions and aspect ratios from within the MediaWarp software.

Do I need a much faster PC to be able to warp movies in real-time ?

While a fast PC or laptop is required to play any kind of HD fulldome content, the task of real-time warping adds very little performance overhead. The resolution and encoding type of the content is of much greater importance in determining how well a movie will play.

What kind of PC or laptop is required to run Mediawarp ?

This will depend on the resolution of the content that you are playing but in general terms, a medium to high end desktop computer or a high end laptop computer is usually required. This will generally equate to a computer with a fast processor, multiple cores and a dedicated mid to high end graphics card. The laptop screen must also have the option to set it's resolution to 1920 x 1080 pixels.

Will Mediawarp also play my existing pre-warped movies ?

Yes, Mediawarp has a setting to turn off the real-time warping for pre-warped movies as well as for standard planar movies.

Will the software warp my standard flat screen movies so that they play in fulldome ?

No, apart from some abstract content, flat screen movies cannot be warped into fulldome. The original content for any warping software mush be a square fisheye image. Flat screen movies can be projected onto the back wall of the dome using the Mediawarp software.

What kind of movie file format does Mediawarp support ?

Mediawarp will play both ".Mov" and ".Avi" files with ".Mov" being the preference in order to use all Mediawarp features. Movie files should be encoded using "H264" compression for best performance. Using "H264" will also provide much smaller file sizes.

Can the HD Solar System Content be played using dome software other the Mediawarp ?

Yes, the HD Solar System content can be played using any dome software that supports the ".Mov" file format.

Do you supply Stellarium, Nightshade, WWT or Celestia with the Mediawarp software ?

No, the Mediawarp software is configured to play fulldome content amd we do not supply these applications with Mediawarp.

Is any special hardware required to play planar or fulldome movies in stereoscopic 3D ?

Yes, several items are required in order to utilise the stereoscopic active 3D features of MediaWarp.

Laptop or PC - Must include a graphics card which supports Quad Buffered Open GL. Generally this is limited to the newer Nvidia graphics cards and the high end Nvidia Quadro FX graphics cards. The card must have a suitable port for connecting an emitter.

Projector - a 120Hz 3D compatible projector is required. A large number of 3D projectors have begun to come onto the market and a comprehensive list of these can be found on the site compiled by Andrew Woods - http://www.3dmovielist.com/projectors.html. While the majority of these projectors will be suitable for 3D planar projection using Mediawarp, we are still waiting for an affordable 3D full HD projector with suitable brightness for a large dome. There are of course several high end 3D full HD projectors made by companies such as Christie, which may be suitable for fixed planetariums.

3D Active Shutter Glasses - Required to view the 3D movie. Many varieties are available but the new Nvidia 3D vision compatible graphics cards are compatible with Nvidia glasses only. Nvidia Quadro FX graphics cards are usually compatible with a range of 3D glasses provided the correct drivers are installed.

3D Emitter - Connects to the graphics card (or projector) using a 3 pin din or USB port and sends out the signal to the 3D active shutter glasses. An emitter technology known as DLP link is now being built in to some of the newer 3D projectors.

Does Mediawarp only support active 3D as mentioned above ?

No, Mediawarp also has a passive 3D option in which the content is output as a combined left / right image using either planar or a double warp mesh. This output can be connected to a external splitter such as the Matrox digital dual-head-2-go http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/dh2go/. The 2 x outputs from this splitter can then be connected to 2 x standard (non 3D) HD projectors, allowing the use of passive 3D filter/glasses technology such as Infitec, Dolby 3D etc..

Are there any full dome stereoscopic 3D films currently available.

Yes, there are several 3D full dome movies currently available including titles such as "Dawn of the Space Age" and "3D Sun". Mediawarp will also be providing our HD Solar System content in full dome 3D format as well as the 3D Voyage animations.