In July 2021, the Shanghai Planetarium opened near the Dishui Lake in Pudong New Area, Shanghai – claiming its place as the largest planetarium in the world.
Aiming to ‘shapie a complete view of the universe’, the planetarium reckons to 'stimulate curiosity, encourage appreciate of the solar system, understand the universe a little and consider the future'. The main exhibition area comprises Homeland, Universe and Journey – representing the universe through a multi-sensory exploration.
The Homeland exhibition area encourages visitors to stop and look up at the stars and then step into space to marvel at the earth, moon and sun, move through the solar system, and then confront the Milky Way to understand our position in space. The Universe exhibition area presents the universe in a panoramic view from the five dimensions of time and space, light, gravity, elements and life, while the interactive exhibits explore the evolution and operation of celestial bodies. The Journey exhibition area shows human exploration of the universe, as well as the vision of the future development of astronomy and space exploration.
The What If theatre is located in the Universe exhibition area and uses an immersive 360° circular screen with 7.1.4 3D sound to create an enveloping universe for the audience. Shanghai Magic Digital Creative Technology Co Ltd (Magic Digital) undertook the audio and video design and production for the theatre.
The 7.1.4 speaker layout is tailor-made for the architectural structure and soundfield of the theatre and does not follow any existing audio production standards (such as Dolby Atmos or Auro 3D). Instead, it is a user-defined environment – which posed a problem for Magic Digital.
At the beginning of demo production, whenever sound effects producers took audio files mixed in a standard surround sound recording studio and played them in situ, they were always ‘very different’ from what they heard during production due to the different placement of the speakers. In ordinary surround sound recording studios the lack of sky channels severely compromises the live effect of immersive sound. The project site only had a replay environment with no production equipment. Magic Digital sound effects production staff moved between the recording studio and the planetarium, but were still unable to produce satisfactory immersive effects. After studying on-site sound reinforcement and immersive sound production systems, sound designer Chen Baizhou decided to move the Merging audio production system to the site, and turn the theatre into a mixing studio to achieve ‘what you hear is what you get’.
The sound reinforcement system of the What If theatre uses an audio network based on the Dante protocol. Magic Digital uses the Pyramix MassCore audio workstation system based on the Ravenna protocol as the core of audio production with a Merging+Hapi handling the outputs. These are connected on-site in Dante Controller through the AES67 protocol. In this way, the theatre loudspeakers become monitor speakers for the sound effects production.
The sound effect team used the ‘user-defined’ bus function in Pyramix to input the position coordinates of the loudspeakers into the software one by one, so that they had a 3D immersion that reflected the loudspeaker layout and could provide a production environment for the mixers.
Through the processing of more than 100 audio tracks and dozens of effect plug-ins, a 7.1.4 3D immersive sound file of the What If theatre version of the planetarium was constructed. The finished immersive sound file perfectly matches the live acoustic conditions and speaker layout to achieve a satisfactory 3D experience.
Zhu Jie, Technical Director of Beijing Dream Formula Digital Technology Co, the support centre at Merging Asia Pacific, led the team in the project implementation.
More: www.merging.com
