If you didn’t get a chance to see “Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure” at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center’s IMAX-dome Space Theatre in Balboa Park, you’ll want to save the above photo for posterity. Not only was Sept. 3 the last day it played, the date also marked the theater’s closing for what looks like the next three and a half months. “Creating Possibilities, Inspiring Tomorrow,” a campaign to revamp the venue, begins today. IMAX-format presentations are set to resume in mid-December, and they’ll feature a new screen, sound system, seating and carpet (it should be noted that the Fleet is also maintaining a preview center, where visitors can have a look at the changes taking place). But from technological and historical standpoints, the improvements are hardly typical. The Space Theater, after all, was the first of its kind throughout the world and has remained virtually unchanged since its construction in 1973, even as tapes morphed into discs and digital sound and video exploded onto the scene some 15 years later. The process is called compound curvature, the latest technology to accommodate the IMAX format. It took some time to catch up with the rest of the world – refinements in aluminum manufacture now enable construction of seamless screens. The technology, said Fleet executive director Jeffrey Kirsch, “looks simple to us, but it’s not simple to an engineer to get the screen panels to match. That was the major step forward.” “The [advance] may seem all of a sudden, but there aren’t that many people stepping up to the plate to rescreen domes. We’re very excited. This is going to be several steps up in quality. We’re raising the bar, and we will be at that point the state-of-the-art theater for IMAX domes in the world.” IMAX – short for Image MAXimum – is a Canadian creation that uses much larger film stock, run sideways through the projector, and allowed image display of greater resolution than conventional film systems. San Diego’s screen is 76 feet high (as opposed to the normal 50), yet the building itself inadvertently absorbed much of the stereo sound. The new digital sound equipment will circumvent the problem, Kirsch said. “We were the first theater,” Kirsch added, “so we had the oldest, and we let it age the longest. I really didn’t want to change it until there was a clear step change that would make people say, ‘Oh, wow’. Otherwise, it’s too costly.” The cost of the project is estimated at $20 million. And, Kirsch added, the dome replacement is only the first of three phases. “A strategy hit me about a year ago,” he explained. “If we tried to do everything at once and go totally digital at the same time that we changed the dome, we would be creating a huge obstacle in showing people what we mean when we say ‘pristine picture’ on the dome. Second of all, how would we know how well the digital’s going to work until we can see what the tried-and-true technology is going to do on the dome? When we looked at the state of projection technologies, our advisors were not convinced that everything was ready to go to provide sufficient resolution. We decided to go one step at a time instead of try to do it all in one swoop. The next step, Kirsch said, is to assess the evolutions of technology and business models that will take the industry to the next level. “That will be something like multiple-projector capability located in the center of the dome. That will put us in the major leagues of full dome planetarium and video.” Today’s digital cameras reproduce reasonable images made up of 3,000 pixels, or dots of color. In order to replicate that digital experience on an IMAX screen, Kirsch said, some 64 million pixels are involved. “Right now,” he said, “we’re looking at one-fourth of that for the next step. That’ll be great. That’ll be a beautiful picture. But it still will not be as good as IMAX is today.” Starting in about a year, Phase II projects will include the installation of a state-of-the-art, full-dome digital projection system that will augment the existing IMAX projector. The full-dome video projection technology will take the Fleet Science Center’s planetarium shows to a new level and allow the Fleet to present other high-definition multimedia video productions that explore scientific topics and entertain with music visualizations, children’s programming and more. For more information, see www.rhfleet.org.