IMAX Dome Theaters Offer a 180-Degree View, but Mostly in Science Museums

IMAX brands roughly five kinds of systems, and what an audience actually sees depends on both how a film was shot and which theater it enters. At the top is IMAX 70mm, in which a film is shot on 70mm film and projected from a 70mm print. IMAX GT Laser follows closely with a dual-laser system rated at 4K and designed for 1.43:1 screens, while IMAX with Laser uses a single-laser projector optimized for wider 1.90:1 screens. The first-generation digital format, IMAX Digital Xenon, pairs dual 2K xenon projectors with smaller auditoriums that some viewers have nicknamed "LieMAX."

IMAX Dome with Laser is the rarest of the group for both production and exhibition. A standard IMAX screen stands vertical and measures roughly 52 by 72 feet; a dome stretches nearly 100 feet in diameter across the whole of a domed ceiling. Because the format depends on fisheye photography, most of what plays there is made for it rather than adapted to it.

The venues are scattered across the United States and abroad. IMAX does not publish an easily searchable list, but fan-maintained resources such as the IMAX Wiki track them. Dome locations include La Geode in France, the Speyer Technik Museum in Germany, the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the China Science & Technology Museum and the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. In the United States, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Cincinnati Museum Center in Ohio and the Saint Louis Science Center all operate IMAX Domes. The Saint Louis institution still uses the OMNIMAX name.

Programming skews educational. The first film made specifically for Omnimax was Garden Isle, a 1973 short documentary, and most dome titles since have followed that pattern, among them Secrets of the Sea and Volcanoes: Fires of Creation. Even so, nearly all dome theaters project at the full-height 1.43:1 IMAX aspect ratio used by the company's 70mm theaters, and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and The Odyssey have both been shown at dome sites, which means a 180-degree view of Trojan War battles is available to anyone near one of them.