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Sanctuary Under the Dome: Creating Transformative Art & Wellness Experiences in an Age of Anxiety

Most planetarium programming is built around teaching people something. This Fulldome Forum, held March 12, 2026, was about a different question: what happens when a dome isn't trying to teach you anything at all, and is just trying to help your nervous system settle down?


Five creators who build wellness-focused dome experiences joined DFW board chair Ed Lantz for the session, along with a physician who studies the science behind why immersive environments affect the body the way they do. You can watch the full recording on YouTube.


Figure 1: Ed Lantz opens the Forum by framing art, music, storytelling, and ritual as humanity's original wellness technologies.
Figure 1: Ed Lantz opens the Forum by framing art, music, storytelling, and ritual as humanity's original wellness technologies.

Sounds of the Ocean


Joshua Sam Miller runs Embodied Sounds and tours a live and pre-recorded experience called Sounds of the Ocean, built from original underwater recordings and music. It debuted at Burning Man in 2019 and has since been staged over 300 times, including planetariums, giant screen cinemas, and a UN Ocean Decade-recognized series running since 2022. The project started when Miller was introduced to blue whale and humpback whale recordings through a research partnership with the Monterey Bay Aquarium.


Figure 2: The Sounds of the Ocean title poster, built from Joshua Sam Miller's original underwater recordings and music.
Figure 2: The Sounds of the Ocean title poster, built from Joshua Sam Miller's original underwater recordings and music.

Figure 3: An overview of the project's reach, from its 2019 Burning Man debut to over 300 stagings across planetariums and giant screen cinemas.
Figure 3: An overview of the project's reach, from its 2019 Burning Man debut to over 300 stagings across planetariums and giant screen cinemas.

What stood out in his talk was how deliberately the project avoids climate guilt as a hook. Miller said the show includes a section encouraging audiences to think about their environmental impact, but the priority is that people leave feeling good, not more afraid, since fear and wellness tend to work against each other. A portion of every ticket goes toward removing plastic from the ocean, and the project partners with Oceanic Global and the Wisdom Keepers delegation to keep Indigenous voices in the conversation rather than talking over them.


Figure 4: The project's conservation partnerships, including ocean plastic removal funded through ticket sales.
Figure 4: The project's conservation partnerships, including ocean plastic removal funded through ticket sales.

Dreams Lost in Time


Sam Stevens has been working in fulldome and VR since 2008, and has spent the last 18 years building what he calls Peaceful Places VR, a library of nature-themed 360 content designed for therapeutic use, under his studio Dreams Lost in Time / Spectra Studios. He's contributed to 15 fulldome films and 8 real-time XR applications, and his second 360 visual album, "90 Days in Europe," won Best 360 Video at the Barcelona India Awards.


Figure 5: The title slide for "90 Days in Europe," Sam Stevens's award-winning 360 visual album.
Figure 5: The title slide for "90 Days in Europe," Sam Stevens's award-winning 360 visual album.

Stevens talked about a formal thesis project analyzing 11 visual albums and 2 artistic fulldome films to identify what makes the genre work: heavy use of landscape and nature imagery, storytelling without narration, and a deliberate blurring of how close or far the imagery feels from reality. He's found that dropping voiceover entirely is the hardest creative constraint he's worked with, but it's also what lets an audience stay with the music instead of following a plot. He's demoed his work one-on-one in medical settings and said people have described it helping them relax, revisit a meaningful memory, or just get through a hard day.


Figure 6: A fisheye nature still representative of the landscape-heavy, narration-free style at the center of Stevens's work.
Figure 6: A fisheye nature still representative of the landscape-heavy, narration-free style at the center of Stevens's work.

The Journey


Michael and Jahna Perricone, who run Mindful Soundscapes & The Enlightenment Projects, walked through their fulldome film The Journey, built around antique Himalayan singing bowls between 300 and 600 years old, layered with an orchestrated score. Michael handles composition and sound design; Jahna is a UCLA-certified mindfulness coach who also performs and co-writes. They described one sound bath session where an audience member with Parkinson's found his tremors stopped during the performance, and said they're seeing early interest in formal research into why.


Figure 7: Michael and Jahna Perricone introduce The Journey, built around antique Himalayan singing bowls layered with an orchestrated score.
Figure 7: Michael and Jahna Perricone introduce The Journey, built around antique Himalayan singing bowls layered with an orchestrated score.

The film premiered as a self-funded, pandemic-era project supported by a small Kickstarter and built with DFW's own Ed Lantz and Kate McCallum. It became a DFW26 official selection, and the Perricones brought a live version, called The Journey Live, to Fiske Planetarium on April 5 this past spring, pairing a live singing bowl performance with the film itself.


Figure 8: The Perricones' overview of the emerging research interest behind fulldome wellness experiences like The Journey.
Figure 8: The Perricones' overview of the emerging research interest behind fulldome wellness experiences like The Journey.

Qualia


Laura Inserra, founder of Chambers of Awe, builds what she calls entrainment art: immersive pieces meant to shift an audience's state rather than deliver a message. Her fulldome piece Qualia was built specifically for planetariums and grew out of research connected to Johns Hopkins on music's effect on mental, emotional, and physical health. She traced her own path back to a formative experience seeing Ian Downie's Mesmerica work at Chabot Space & Science Center in 2018.


Figure 9: Laura Inserra's Chambers of Awe studio slide, framed around Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine's work on coherence in complex systems.
Figure 9: Laura Inserra's Chambers of Awe studio slide, framed around Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine's work on coherence in complex systems.

Figure 10: The Qualia poster alongside Inserra's design principles for the piece, plus the instruments used to build its soundscape.
Figure 10: The Qualia poster alongside Inserra's design principles for the piece, plus the instruments used to build its soundscape.

Inserra pushed back on the idea that wellness content should announce itself as good for you. She said audiences don't respond well to being told what to feel, and that the goal of Qualia is closer to what she called a psychedelic experience without medicine, using sound and imagery to shift people's state and letting whatever comes up be different for each person. She closed with a story about a woman who told her that after the show, she looked at the tree in her own backyard and, for the first time in 25 years living in that house, didn't feel alone.


Figure 11: Inserra's closing guidance for creators building wellness-focused dome content: begin with the state you want to evoke, and let purpose guide the medium.
Figure 11: Inserra's closing guidance for creators building wellness-focused dome content: begin with the state you want to evoke, and let purpose guide the medium.

The Science of Coherence


Dr. Mitch Abrams, a radiologist and founder of NexGenHealth, was on the panel as the outside perspective, someone who doesn't build dome content but studies the physiology behind why immersive experiences affect people. He walked through the concept of heart rate coherence: when your heart rhythm shifts into a regular, sinusoidal pattern under conditions like awe, love, or deep calm, versus the irregular pattern produced by stress and anxiety. He referenced a peer-reviewed study from August 2023 showing that people who practiced inducing coherence had measurably higher immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in a dose-dependent relationship.


Figure 12: Dr. Mitch Abrams's TEDxTrinityBellwoods talk, "The Medicine of Frequencies," on the physiology behind heart rate coherence.
Figure 12: Dr. Mitch Abrams's TEDxTrinityBellwoods talk, "The Medicine of Frequencies," on the physiology behind heart rate coherence.

He also pointed to older research: a Harvard psychologist's multi-year coherence and compassion study during the Lebanese civil war in the late 1980s, and the Global Consciousness Project, a long-running experiment out of Princeton measuring correlations between world events and random number generator output. His point wasn't that domes are uniquely magical, but that there's a growing, measurable body of evidence for why shared immersive experiences affect people physiologically, and that fulldome creators are already doing, intuitively, what the research is starting to confirm.


Figure 13: A published comparison (Vazza & Feletti, 2020) between the structure of the brain's neuronal network and the large-scale cosmic web, cited as an example of coherent patterns recurring across scales.
Figure 13: A published comparison (Vazza & Feletti, 2020) between the structure of the brain's neuronal network and the large-scale cosmic web, cited as an example of coherent patterns recurring across scales.

Figure 14: Abrams's "Medicinal Mandala" framing, understanding energy and coherence through both Western science and Eastern wisdom.
Figure 14: Abrams's "Medicinal Mandala" framing, understanding energy and coherence through both Western science and Eastern wisdom.

Why This Matters for Planetariums


Ed Lantz raised a tension that ran through the whole session: planetariums exist primarily to serve STEM education and astronomy, which makes it hard for wellness-focused content to find a regular slot. Several panelists pushed back gently on how this content gets marketed, since telling an audience "this is good for you" tends to have the opposite effect from intended. What worked better, several agreed, was simply making the experience available and letting people describe it in their own words afterward.


The panel's suggestions for venues interested in this kind of programming: open up an underused morning slot, consider a membership model for recurring wellness visits, and build a relationship with a local practitioner audiences can be pointed toward once the lights come up. As more domes experiment with this kind of programming, this Forum is a good primer on both the creative case for it and the science backing it up.


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