Beyond Planetariums: How COSM and Sphere Are Reshaping the Fulldome Media Landscape
- DFW Team
- Jan 21
- 6 min read
Two companies with very deep pockets have started building giant immersive domes that have nothing to do with astronomy education, and the fulldome community has feelings about it. This Fulldome Forum, held January 15, 2026 and DFW's first of the year, brought together four people with very different vantage points on what MSG's Sphere and Cosm's venues mean for the traditional planetarium world: a themed-entertainment marketer, an immersive content producer, a 40-year giant screen cinema veteran, and someone actually running one of these new LED domes day to day.
You can watch the full session on YouTube.
How We Got Here
DFW board chair Ed Lantz opened with a quick history of the format: the first planetarium in the 1920s, Spitz's more affordable Model A classroom planetarium that spread the format widely, and a progression of projection technology from Cinerama 360 fisheye film through IMAX Dome (originally Omnimax) to Digistar's first digital fisheye video system in the early 1980s. Roughly 2,000 planetariums worldwide have since upgraded to some form of fulldome video. LED is the newest step in that progression, but it's also a bigger one, because for the first time the dome itself is the display, and the companies building the biggest examples of it aren't planetariums at all.
The View From Themed Entertainment
Tracy Balsz, founder of IndieMarketing and a former DFW board member, has spent 30 years in themed and location-based entertainment. She traced immersive screen technology back further than most people would think to look: the Haunted Mansion's Pepper's Ghost projection at Disneyland, then Shanghai Disneyland's 2021 expansion into fully domed, animated ride experiences. From there she walked through flying theater rides like Universal's Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, and standalone flying theater attractions now common in tourist destinations like Niagara Falls and Vancouver. In her own research into the format, the largest fulldome screen she found was a 20-meter frameless dome built for Mason Robot Land Flying Theater in South Korea in 2021, and SeaWorld Abu Dhabi's recently opened Hypersphere 360, a spherical screen built from 75 million pixels, has already picked up multiple industry awards.
Her read on where this leaves fulldome creators: it's a genuine, growing vertical to monetize work in, not a threat to it. Ride and flying theater experiences are typically five to eight minutes, dramatically shorter than a standard planetarium show, and demand for that format keeps expanding into more cities.
The Content Producer's Path In
Jenni Ogden, CEO of Eye Q Productions and a DFW board member, described a career that arrived at fulldome sideways, starting in projection design for Disney Cruise Line and Disney theme park theater, including the first 3D projection mapping done for Disneyland's "it's a small world" 50th anniversary. A later project 3D-mapped buildings around a lagoon at Universal Orlando, with several projection-mapped spheres floating in the water, which is what first got her hooked on the idea of entertainment happening inside a dome rather than just on one. She went on to develop original fulldome work at the Vortex Dome, a permanent installation Ed Lantz ran at LA Center Studios, including a project called Passione, and she's currently building Metamorphosis, a social-impact fulldome film paired with a companion mobile game that sends players out to take real environmental action.
Ogden's framing for the industry was pointedly "yes, and": she's not interested in treating LED domes and traditional projection domes as competitors. Metamorphosis is actually launching first as small, community-based activations in a portable projection dome before any larger venue.
The Industry Veteran's Analysis
Mike Lutz of Lutz Strategies has been in the field since a fourth-grade planetarium field trip in 1972, and has worked at Laser Fantasy, MacGillivray Freeman Films, IMAX, Evans & Sutherland, Spitz, and Cosm over a roughly 40-year career. He broke down Sphere and Cosm as genuinely different businesses. Sphere trades almost entirely in immersive concerts and giant-screen-style experiences under an IMAX-like dome geometry, is largely a closed platform for its own programming, and reportedly cost around $2.3 billion to build, a figure Lutz suspects is conservative. Cosm grew out of its 2020 acquisition of Evans & Sutherland and leans heavily into live sports, supplemented by art experiences (a Cirque du Soleil collaboration, work with artist Nancy Baker Cahill) and "embellished" versions of existing Hollywood films like The Matrix and Willy Wonka. Cosm also runs food and beverage service inside its venues during shows, a meaningful revenue difference from the traditional planetarium model.
Beyond its own venues, Cosm also sells its LED dome technology directly to institutions as a B2B product: the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History's Omni Theater reopened with a roughly $20.3 million investment (covering the LED system, theater renovation, and lobby), the Prague Planetarium installed a Cosm LED dome, and Arizona's Dorrance Dome opened using the same underlying technology. Lutz's core argument is about how these projects get justified financially: at this price point, an LED dome can't be evaluated as a standalone profit center the way a ticketed attraction would be. It has to be judged first as what he called a "relevance engine," a way for an institution to stay meaningful and visible to its community, with earned revenue as a secondary benefit that follows from that relevance.
Lutz also pointed to the Giant Screen Cinema Association's ongoing push to get theater operators, producers, and distributors talking directly to museum leadership and funders, building on a milestone event GSCA ran at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. A similar event is being planned for September 15-16, 2026, in Phoenix, timed to the American Alliance of Museums and ASTC community there.
Running One: The Dorrance Dome
Alec Warren directs Dome Experiences and the Planetarium at Arizona Science Center's Dorrance Dome in Phoenix, an 18-meter, 200-seat Cosm LED dome that opened in October 2025 after a roughly two-year renovation, following about two years of fundraising before that. The full project cost around $14 million, with roughly $9 million of that going toward the Cosm LED system itself; the rest covered construction and renovation. One real physical constraint Warren flagged for any institution considering the jump: an LED dome screen can weigh up to 40 times what a traditional projection aluminum mesh screen weighs, which is a serious structural and cost consideration for older buildings, and part of why some well-established institutions have looked at LED and concluded it isn't feasible for their space.
What stood out most in his talk was the range of programming the space now supports. The front four rows convert to 88 removable flex seats, opening the floor for non-traditional formats. Daytime programming stays focused on live astronomy shows and fulldome films for school groups and general admission. Evenings get more experimental: yoga and sound healing under an umbrella series called Mindful Moments, a sip-and-paint series for 21-and-up audiences, custom fan-content shows built around K-pop Demon Hunters and Bad Bunny (with a Taylor Swift show in development), and a live band at the venue's grand opening set against 360-degree photography of a local historic theater. The dome also hosted roughly 200 astronomers during a Phoenix visit from the American Astronomical Society for a live showcase of first-look images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, produced with NSF's NOIRLab and Intuitive Planetarium in Huntsville, Alabama.
Warren's read on where the format goes next: more convergence between fulldome, giant screen, and VR content pipelines, since a dome like his (with a full hemisphere plus a floor-level apron extension) is already being mastered in the same 16K-equivalent equirectangular formats used for VR production. He expects that as more venues adopt similar hybrid geometries, common technical standards will start to emerge across what has historically been a highly custom, non-standardized industry.
The Bottom Line
The panel's shared read: Sphere and Cosm haven't sidelined traditional planetariums, they've made the format more visible and more marketable, giving smaller domes a cultural reference point ("we're like the Sphere, but local") they didn't have before. The opportunity for the wider fulldome community isn't to compete head-on with billion-dollar venues, but to borrow their playbook: better content, more flexible live programming, and treating an LED investment as a relevance strategy first and a revenue strategy second.
Forum Speakers
Tracy Balsz — Founder, IndieMarketing
Jenni Ogden — CEO, Eye Q Productions
Mike Lutz — Lutz Strategies
Alec Warren — Director, Dome Experiences & Planetarium, Arizona Science Center's Dorrance Dome
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