A Universe of Possibilities

Digistar 4 is in a class all its own, providing powerful features and the most user friendly interface in the industry. Its robust digital theater platform offers presenters day-to-day reliability matched with innovative tools to inspire the most demanding audiences.

• Revolutionary Graphical User Interface With Drag-and-Drop Simplicity
• Extensive Media and 3D Model Support
• Enhanced Visual Realism
• Advanced Astronomical Functions With Integrated Digital Universe The Digital Universe was developed by the American Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Copyright 2000-2007, the American Museum of Natural History. All rights reserved.
• Comprehensive Library
• Fully Integrated Fulldome Video and Real-time Stereo 3D
• Advanced Real-time Show Production Tools

 

Revolutionary Graphical User Interface

One of the hallmarks of Digistar 4 is its advanced, user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) built on Windows 7 64-bit OS. This amazing point and click interface was inspired by extensive user feedback and years of experience from designing previous generations of Digistar systems. The content in Digistar 4 is organized in a fully customizable and searchable library with a fully interactive real-time view of the dome right inside the GUI. Content moves from the library to the dome view with a simple drag and drop for instant fulldome display. The system is so flexible that content also can be dragged from Windows Explorer directly to the dome.

The interface organizes and locates frequent tasks within a few mouse clicks of one another. The interface makes it easier to do everything - easier for a novice user to find and play an existing show, easier for presenters to give live astronomy shows and easier for everyone to create spectacular custom fulldome shows. Digistar 4 puts the power of science education and flexible storytelling in the presenter's hands.

• Digistar's industry leading Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the result of years of experience, user feedback, and professional design and implementation.
• See and control the entire Digistar system from a single operator console or interact directly with Dome View display to control the system in real time.
• Digistar's user interface is fully localized - that is, a simple software switch can present the GUI in any language, including Chinese.
• Digistar's GUI Library is a convenient way to see all available shows, presentations, 3D models, images and other content. There's no need for an operator to browse hard disk drives and folders to find video and shows. There's no need to write a script or pre-program a show - just double-click on a show icon in the library to start playing.
• The Digistar Library is extensible - users can easily add new shows and additional presentation materials
• Add custom logos and images
• Digistar features drag-and-drop simplicity. Any 3D object, image or other presentation content from the Digistar Library can be displayed by simply dragging it directly into the interactive Dome View window. Once active, users can directly manipulate the content - change its position, rotation, scale, color, opacity and many other attributes! E&S' competitors require users to type commands or master complex scripting languages, and still their results are less flexible - less sophisticated.
• Digistar has a special presentation mode that displays limited system functions. This mode is designed for day-to-day operators in presentation environments where only a limited number of shows are presented.

 

Extensive Media and 3D Model Support

• Digistar has a powerful, flexible real-time 3D graphics engine which supports a wide range of simulations and presentations including (but not limited to):
• Custom 2D/3D logos, text, videos and images can be easily layered within any presentation with drag-and-drop simplicity
• Display and manipulation of real-time 3D models
• Display high-resolution still images with 3D transition effects
• Architectural visualization and building fly-through inspection
• Space and Astronomical simulations
• Host third-party meetings and conferences in your theater
• Live HD video input with real-time chroma keyer
• Digistar supports multi-camera and multi-scene real-time graphics. This allows:
• Numerous "picture-in-picture" displays of real-time scenes
• Multi-camera switching between real-time scenes, as in live television productions
• Live transitions such as dissolves and wipes between two or more scenes
• Digistar easily layers or crossfades between fulldome video and real-time graphics.
• Digistar supports more industry standard 3D model and media (audio/video/image) file formats than any other digital theater system. Digistar's open architecture allows virtually any data format to be imported into the system for display on the dome in real time.
• Digistar includes an SDK, allowing users to create custom 3D objects from scientific data or other datasets. Users can then customize how this data is displayed on the dome. All custom objects become fully integrated with Digistar and can be manipulated by the GUI.

 

Enhanced Visual Realism

Digistar features a number of real-time special effects to enhance the realism of scenes:

• Sunlight & Clouds
• Aurora
• Snow, Rain, Rainbows, lightning
• Fire, rocket exhaust, spacecraft thrusters
• Real-time ring system particles for fantastic fly-thrus
• Real-time Particle Systems:
  • volcanoes and ice geysers
  • water fountains
  • smoke
  • futuristic ray beams
  • warp speed effects
• Real shadows and lighting effects for planetary objects
• Meteor showers

 

Advanced Astronomical Functions With Integrated Digital Universe

• New navigation tools allow you to move freely though the universe, selecting and orbiting an object of interest. Other systems offer navigation, but none more intuitive than Digistar 4.

• The AMNH Digital Universe data set is completely integrated. Various components of the data set may be selected for display with the proper brightness, color and proportion. Data set visual representation may be modified or culled based on user set attributes.
• Integrated live navigation controls, including intuitive free flight and orbit controls plus automated flight to celestial objects.

• Digital Starfield
• The star database includes more stars and scientific data than the Hipparcos and Digital Universe databases. The star database is fully customizable in real time.
• The starfield includes double stars and exoplanets.
• Every star in the database is a 3D star of correct size, color, rotation and with 3D corona.
• Planetary Bodies
• Improved real-time animations for planetary surfaces including independent controls for clouds, shadows, rings, terrestrial lights, ocean surface, etc.
• Digistar uses high resolution textures for planet features, further enhancing the realism of the planets' topography where data is available.

 

Comprehensive Library

The Digistar 4 user interface has been specifically designed to be as simple as possible while retaining great functionality. Digistar 4's Library makes it easy to find content with even large collections. Here are some ways to organize the data:

• Shortcut buttons quickly arrange content by Shows, Trailers, Sky, Planets & Sun, Zodiacal Constellations, Messier Object, Scripts, Audio or Video content.
• A live search area allows users to type key words to find content. The list is filtered to show results.
• To help with searches users can add Tags to any item. A Tag is a keyword that helps group objects. For example maybe "Astronomy 101" or "Friday". An object can have multiple tags allowing quick access to similar items.
• A recently played area provides one click access to the most recently played shows or trailers.
• A traditional folder view displays a hierarchical view of all the content in the library.
• When an astronomy object is selected a related item window shows other content that is associated with that object. For example, when selecting a constellation, Digistar also provides links to related asterisms, deep space objects, meteor showers, named stars within the constellation and more.
• Users can drag content into Presentations, folders for organizing selected content for custom theater presentations.
• Smart Lists are filtered by user-defined criteria. These Smart Lists can include live updating so Digistar automatically adds any applicable new content to the Smart List.
• Playlists are an easy way to assemble shows, real-time scripts or audio that can then be played back in order. Point and click buttons allow quick customization.

 

Fully Integrated Fulldome Video and Real-time Stereo 3D

Integrated Fulldome Video

• With Digistar 4 there is no need to encode custom fulldome video for each and every theater. Encode a show once for one theater and it will play in any D4 theater that has the same type and number of projectors. For example, one encode will work for every 4K x 4K theater with cove mounted projectors.
• Digistar 4 contains custom hardware and software to keep multichannel video streams in frame accurate synchronization. This is especially critical with 4K and 8K systems that have projectors fed with four HD video inputs. Even systems that use video genlock will get out of sync and tile badly. Digistar 4 is frame accurate so fulldome images at any resolution will stay synchronized, making fulldome shows look incredible on the dome.
• Digistar 4 offers video and real-time playback at 60 frames per second, twice the industry standard of 30 FPS. By doubling the number of frames played back over the same amount of time, the perceived resolution of the scene goes up exponentially. Motion appears much crisper and less blurry since there is twice as much visible detail in the scenes.
• Real-time models can be composited on top of or behind prerendered fulldome video. Digistar 4 also includes a luminance keyer allowing creative fulldome video and real-time layering in real time.
• Live video input accepts up to 1920x1080 HD or SD video from a variety of sources including Blu-ray, DVD, satellite/cable, PC, and video cameras for real-time display anywhere on the dome. Real-time chroma keyer allows instant compositing of live video.

Real-time Stereo 3D

• Spherical 3D® surround stereo (for real-time and prerendered video) allows 3D objects to appear in stereo anywhere on the dome, even in the back of the theater.
• Multiple stereoscopic display methods supported including Active Stereo, INFITEC 3D Stereo, and ColorCode 3D (Anaglyphic)
• Any real-time object in Digistar 4 can be displayed in stereo 3D with a few mouse clicks offering unsurpassed ability to view the universe in three dimensions. Galaxy clusters come alive as they surround the audience and reveal surprising spatial relationships only visible in 3D.
• Digistar 4 can natively play back 3D fulldome movies and 3D giant screen film transfers to fulldome.

 

Show Production Tools

E&S offers a number of fulldome show production tools ranging from the Virtual Projectors plug in for Adobe After Effects, through the fully-featured Digistar 4 Producer show production system. Click to see the available choices.