GOVERNMENT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The new Gates Planetarium in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science opens impressively today by taking visitors on an immersive solar system voyage featuring the highest- resolution graphics ever presented in a digital planetarium. Powered by innovative SGI visualization technologies, the planetarium lets the audience fly through outer space to experience awe-inspiring close-up views of some of the most remarkable objects in the universe. The graphics data for the planetarium's opening show, Gates Planetarium: A Cosmic Journey, is drawn from the Cosmic Atlas, a highly sophisticated database of the cosmos created by the museum. The database includes billions of stars and all the planets, moons, rings, comets, asteroids and even man- made objects in the solar system, which total more than 250,000. The museum spent three years developing its database and presentation software. The presentation is driven by a 30-processor SGI(R) Onyx(R) 3800 visualization system with 11 InfiniteReality4(TM) graphics subsystems, the largest number of such pipes ever used for any visualization system. "This cutting-edge digital technology will entertain museum visitors in a way that inspires awe and excitement," said Vince Wolfe, project director for the Space Odyssey exhibition and Gates Planetarium. "It will also help the museum educate audiences by taking them out into space in a way that no traditional, opto-mechanical starball planetarium can do." The Gates is the first planetarium to use a digital light processing (DLP) projection system. In a 125-seat theater with a 164-degree field of view and a 25-degree tilt angle, the audience sits in reclining seats to view images featuring a resolution of more than 12 million pixels, displayed on the 57- foot dome by 11 edge-blended projectors. "The black background and bright whites from our projection system help us get a high contrast ratio of around 10:1, and the colors are vibrant, crisp and extremely high resolution," said Howard Cook, chief technologist for Gates Planetarium. "SGI is excited to be a technology partner for the new Gates Planetarium," said SGI Marketing Manager Afshad Mistri. "This world-class facility is the most sophisticated planetarium to be found anywhere in terms of its graphics database and visualization technologies. The museum and the people of Denver are to be congratulated for this accomplishment."