The StoryDome is an immersive learning environment designed to facilitate dialogues about what it takes to increase the resilience of communities and bioregions. Its mission is to inspire participants to ask questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos. Using the latest scientific data and visualizations from NASA, NOAA, and elsewhere, we are creating productions to provide a big picture context that demonstrates the interconnectedness and interdependence of ecosystems at multiple scales.

We began by utilizing cutting edge immersive visualization technologies — i.e. beautifully rendered images of interconnected scientific datasets — to create an awe-inspiring, visceral experience for visitors to the Seattle World’s Fair Next Fifty celebration. See: thenextfifty.org

Our Earth Portal Exhibit opened on April 21, 2012 (Earth Day) as a featured exhibit at the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, and it ran for the entire six months. The Earth Portal helped visitors gain a deeper appreciation for the latest scientific understanding of the Universe and the preciousness of life on Earth, as well as ask critical questions about the future of life on Earth and our role in it.

Since then we have traveled up and down the West Coast offering StoryDome shows in many venues and developing post-show workshops to engage people in learning together.

The immersive Earth Portal experience also offers interactive exhibits and educational materials that demonstrate ways in which whole systems thinking, design science, and collaborative processes can be used to address many of the complex challenges facing humanity. By engaging audiences of all ages through the power of visual storytelling, we are looking forward to seeing what kind of resilient future our community will imagine for the 21st century!

*The StoryDome is a portable immersive multimedia environment (an inflatable planetarium – 25 feet in circumference and 13 feet high) that can provide breath-taking visualizations of a guided tour of the universe, the evolution of life on earth, the unfolding story of humanity, and ecosystemic insights into one’s own bioregion.