The Imaginarium is a space to encourage creativity, alternative thinking, and playful interaction. The interior of the dome is equipped with hemispherical video projection, surround sound audio, and climate control. It is a tool for education, research, and collaborative work.
I am second author on a paper that I presented at the International Conference on Design Creativity in Glasgow, Scotland in 2012.
The Imaginarium can be configured to create a wide variety of environments.
Our goal was to create a space that could be transformed by media to stimulate the sensory imagination, promote a state of mental relaxation and encourage creativity in a collaborative context. The occupants’ perception of a physical and mental separation from the outside world helps to promote open-minded thinking, and the unconventional environment and means of visualization can offer new ways of looking at problems and solutions. By completely immersing the user into the space with sounds, visuals and other lighting effects, the dome can recreate a wide variety of different environments, moods and contexts, making it a flexible and powerful tool for research, education and collaborative work.
Here the Imaginarium is set up as a sky as part of a warm-up for a design class.
The Imaginarium offers several unique advantages as a prototyping platform. Hemispherical projection means that an occupant’s full field of view is saturated with media at any one time, no matter their location or orientation within the dome, and no matter how many occupants there are. Therefore, the dome could be used to create (or recreate) immersive environments that are representative of real-world places, or even entirely virtual. A group could be “transported” by means of multimedia from Death Valley to the streets of Mumbai, for example, or they could interact with avatars online. Designers could use this feature to immerse themselves in a relevant problem context; anthropologists could immerse themselves in life in faraway villages; physicists could take extended journeys through the outer reaches of the universe.
On the left is a schematic of the dimensions of the Imaginarium and the projector setup. On the right is a close-up of the projector hanging from the Imaginarium. Note the minimal occulsion by the projector.
My role in the project included outfitting the Imaginarium with projection capabilities, prototyping different use modalities, and testing different projection environments. The Imaginarium uses a standard projector that shines onto a hemispherical mirror to project the image onto the walls of the dome.
360 degree projectors do exist, but one of our big priorities with this project was keeping costs low and making sure everything could be disassembled and reassembled easily. I figured out a way to how to hang the projector and worked to adjust it and test different videos.
I am the second author on a paper accepted to ICDC, the International Conference on Design Creativity. I gave a 2 minute presentation during the conference, was part of a large poster session, and led a 30 minute workshop on creativity and design thinking for other conference participants.
The Imaginarium is a cardboard geodesic dome that is about 18 feet in diameter.
We designed the Imaginarium designed with three primary functions in mind:
1. To create an enclosed space that provides physical and psychological separation from the outside world, while providing maximum usefulness/flexibility for the occupants;
2. To allow for video projection on as much of the interior surface as possible, with as little occlusion as possible, to ensure full field-of-vision viewing from any location within the dome.
3. To create a rich audio landscape for quality listening at any location within the dome.
The Imaginarium offers a number of different working modalities useful for collaborative work.
The Imaginarium has been host to a number of class sessions (from Product Design to Video Arts) and many diverse groups of visitors, and has been used as a prototyping testbed for graduate students in design engineering, virtual reality, and fine arts. Most first-time visitors report an immediate positive change to their state of mind, with one exclaiming “I haven’t felt this relaxed in months!” Several students have expressed their immediate intention to build one for personal use. As a general rule, occupants find the dome to be a peaceful environment that promotes relaxation (with or without media immersion). There is also a considerable “wow” factor; first-time audiences will often break out in spontaneous applause at the conclusion of a demonstration.
