Swinburne Astronomy Productions

AstroTour Theatre Hardware

AstroTour 3D Theatre's use passive stereoscopic projection to create the 3D effect and are driven by a Macintosh Workstations. Each theatre is custom designed to best suit the installation site.

3D Screen Special polarization preserving 3D screens are required for a passive stereosopic projection system. Screens are available in virtually any size and can be setup for front or rear projection
Computer All AstroTour 3D Theatre's are driven by Apple Macintosh Workstations. The Macintosh provides an impressive balance between usability, performance and stability. These machines are powerful enough to playback high quality stereoscopic movies and drive the latest openGL interactive software applications
Projectors DLP projectors are the first choice for passive stereosopic systems. The choice of projectors is customised for each installation as they depend heavily on screen size, projector location and room setup
Projection Mount High quality, fully adjustable stereo projection mounts allow for perfect alignment of the stereo projectors and ensure they stay that way. The projection mount is custom design to attach to the ceiling, wall or sit in a standard audiovisual rack
Glasses AstroTour theatres are supplied with lightweight, durable 3D glasses that are comfortable for your audience and fit over regular glasses
Console The theatre is controlled from an operator console which includes 2 15" LCD displays, keyboard and mouse.

AstroTour Theatre Software

Our software library has been developed over the last 4 years. Most of our packages were originally written for our own visualisation research, but now are available as part of the Science Visualisation System. The system comes complete with all our software, users guides and interactive demos that highlight possible applications.

If you have existing hardware and would like to license some of our software, or to arrange a demonstration in our VR Theatre, simply contact us.

PackageDescription
Greyhound * Plays stereoscopic 3D movie's encoded as QuickTime files. This application uses a multi-threaded QuickTime playback engine and is capable of playing back stereo content in true HD without the need for expensive disk arrays - i.e. 1920 × 1080 resolution in each eye!
Image Viewer Simply and easily view stereo pairs. Can be used to view a sequence of stereo pairs as a method of a 3D powerpoint presentation
3D Dataset Viewer Interactively explore static or time varying 3D datasets stored (x,y,z) format.
Movie Builder Build a sequence of targa frames into a movie high resolution stereo movie
Movie Player Play a stereo movie built using the movie builder
Volume Renderer Interactively explore 3D volume data sets.
S2Plot C/Fortan API for creating stereo capable software. Similar in design to the PGPlot library. More Information

* on Apple Macintosh systems only