Ultra-Realistic Sightseeing Images Using Digital Planetarium System

Conventional images of tourist sites are trimmed off the unnecessary scenery from the whole scenery in the fixed viewing angle of the cinematographer’s intention. Therefore, when people visit a tourist destination, they are often disappointed about the gap between video image and actual sight. In order to eliminate this gap, we developed the Digital Dome Theatre System in 2009. It can project ultra-realistic images of tourist sites on all the directions of the dome screen using an ultra high definition 4K video camera and projector. Firstly we used the World heritage ‘Kumano Kodo’ as sample data and performed the comparative experiments of dome images and flat images. As a result, we found that dome images are effective tools for enticing people to visit the tourist location. Generally, an intangible folk-cultural asset is difficult to tell the wonderfulness and to turn it into a tourism resource compared with a tangible one. Then we made a dome show program of an intangible folk-cultural asset ‘Shimotsuki Matsuri’ and performed open experiments at a planetarium theatre at Iida City Museum, Nagano. In this paper, we present an outline of our Digital Dome Theatre system and the experiments, and discuss its possibility for tourism.