Greatest
GeekJ O B SAN ARCHITECTURAL MARVEL Completed
after nearly a decade of work (and $500
million), the Academy building is an
achievement in both design and technol-
ogy, fusing its unique form with the heady
exhibits housed within. The living roof,
for example, is a 2.5 acre parkland that is
home to 1.7 million native plants.HALO EFFECT A ring composed of
thousands of LEDs encircles the base
of the dome’s interior, providing
ambient lighting of any desired color.
The dome’s surface is made of special
refl ective nanoseam panels, which
blend together to look like one giant
screen from a distance.NO PLACE LIKE DOME The Morrison Planetarium’s 90-foot-diameter dome is the most imposing structure inside the California Academy of
Sciences. In keeping with the building’s green design, the dome’s structural frame is made of 100-percent recycled steel. Even when looking
to the stars, the Academy is thinking about Earth.52 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| FEB 09 | http://www.maximumpc.com
the computing hardware is, what’s more remark-
able is how seamlessly this complicated setup
works to produce a breathtaking show.
Currently, visitors to Morrison Planetarium
enjoy a presentation called Fragile Planet, which
runs on one of the computing clusters using Global
Immersion soft ware. The 25-minute show was
written, scripted, scored, and digitally modeled
in-house by fi lm industry veterans and lift s view-
ers out of their seats on an exploratory journey
through our solar system and beyond. The plan-
etarium’s domed display fi lls your entire peripheral
vision—an eff ect so encompassing that you really
feel as though you’re soaring over the landscape of
Mars or warping across the Milky Way.
A second computing cluster—consisting of
seven HP XW8600 workstations, each running a
dual-core Xeon processor and an Nvidia Quadro
FX5600 videocard—powers real-time Uniview
soft ware, the platform on which presentations such
as Fragile Planet can be scripted, pre-visualized,
recorded, and even played back in real time with
OpenGL, like a secret director’s cut edition of Spore.
All the high-defi nition video is channeled through
dual-link DVI cables into a Black Diamond DVI