FLEET TAKES VIEWERS ON 3-D TOUR AMONG STARS

While riding through space into a microscopic world, heads duck to escape being hit by giant atoms and meteors. The room begins to spin rapidly as strings of DNA, chromosomes and cells sweep around the walls of the dome.

In just 11 minutes, you can take a 5-billion-year journey through the evolution of life. Then, after the trip, the lights flick on and the audience can take off their funny, colored eyeglasses.

“We Are Born of Stars,” the first three-dimensional film ever created to be projected on a domed Omnimax screen, is being shown several times a day through summer at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center.

“It has always been the dream of science fiction fans and 3-D nuts that they would be able to see 3-D films on a screen like this,” said Colin Low, a 3-D animation specialist and one of the film’s collaborators, while lecturing at the theater on Monday. “On a flat screen, images can come right up to your nose, but they can’t circle around you the way they do with a dome screen.”

3-D films created for flat screens are based on the principle of stereo photography, where two pictures that are slightly offset are combined through optics to give the illusion of three dimensions, Low explained. But this movie was created entirely from computer-generated graphics.

Although the technology for making 3-D films is becoming more modern, Low said experts still haven’t figured out a way to do away with having to wear the 3-D glasses.

The makeshift paper specs make it possible to change flat images into three dimensional figures. The red-blue lenses in the glasses manipulate the viewer’s vision.

“Born of Stars” was created for the Fujitsu pavilion at the 1985 International Exposition in Tsukuba, Japan.

The director of the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater learned about it at a convention in Canada in 1985, said Mary Hettinger, community services coordinator for the space theater.

“He was very impressed with the movie and showed it a couple of times last year to get audience feedback,” she said. “People seemed to really enjoy it, so we decided to show it this year.”

It is being shown with “Skyward,” a 23-minute documentary focusing on the lives of a family of Canada geese. This film was also designed for the dome screen.