Remember Fort Worth’s Omni IMAX? It’s coming back, but now as an immersive digital dome
For nearly 40 years, the Omni Theater IMAX with its 180-degree dome ceiling dazzled movie-goers and busloads of kids on field trips to the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
Then came COVID-19.
The theater, which was Fort Worth’s only IMAX, abruptly shut down in March 2020 and never reopened.
But the museum on Montgomery Street intends to revive the Omni Theater in a spectacular way: By converting its soaring dome into one giant LED screen that will create an immersive experience like nothing most movie-goers have ever seen.
In fact, the Omni would be the world’s largest digital dome theater of its kind in a museum.
Gone would be the massive IMAX machinery that had projected movies onto the dome’s white ceiling since 1983. Now the ceiling itself would be a high-definition digital screen capable of not only showing films, but also creating interactive presentations and streaming live events.
The dome would be lined with thousands of LED digital modules that don’t need a projector at all. Think of it like a giant television screen, only these panels will deliver much higher definition than your flatscreen at home.
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“The brilliance, the brightness, the high definition — it’s going to feel like you’re there,” said Orlando Carvalho, the retired executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics who has served as the museum’s interim president since the spring. “For the first time, the museum will have a venue that is truly interactive.”
For the $20.3 million project, which also includes an extensive renovation of the theater lobby, the museum plans to contract with a Los Angeles-based technology company called Cosm that has produced large-scale digital immersive and virtual reality experiences at planetariums and a variety of other venues across the globe.
Cosm recently announced plans to build its second Cosm-branded public entertainment venue at Grandscape in The Colony, north of Dallas. Cosm’s first such venue is under construction in Hollywood Park in Los Angeles. The company was founded in 2020 by Dallas-based Mirasol Capital through a series of acquisitions of businesses in spatial computing, engineering and immersive video production.
Cosm’s CEO and president, Jeb Terry Jr., grew up in Dallas and remembers visiting Fort Worth’s Omni Theater as a boy, seeing an IMAX film of a helicopter flying over the city. So the Omni project is special to him.
“The opportunity to contribute now is really exciting for me personally,” he told the Star-Telegram.
The museum hopes to begin construction in early 2023. As of December, the nonprofit museum had raised 80 percent of the money it needs to begin construction, which will take about 18 months.
Funding includes $5 million from the city of Fort Worth, $3 million from Tarrant County, $3 million from the Amon G. Carter Foundation, $1 million from the Ryan Foundation and $1 million from the William Scott Foundation. Carvalho says he’s confident the museum will be able to fill the remaining $4 million gap.
Renovations to the theater’s lobby will transform it into a larger open space that can host private and corporate events. The reconfigured lobby will also bring it up to today’s standards for accessibility.
Inside the dome theater, all the seats will be replaced with larger, more comfortable ones. The new theater will have about 300 total seats.
Like before the pandemic shutdowns, the new Omni will be open to the public with daily showings, from documentaries to an occasional Hollywood movie. “The Polar Express” showings at the IMAX were always popular around Christmas.
But what Carvalho is most excited about is how the theater’s new digital dome will add new dimensions to the museum’s mission to educate.
Think of the screen as a giant iPad — it can display multiple elements at the same time, from videos to animated presentations to Zoom calls. If the museum has an exhibit on dinosaurs, an immersive film could bring T-Rex to life.
While the new Omni will be high-tech, the museum still wants to preserve some of the theater’s history. Visitors queuing into the new theater will be able to see the old IMAX projector and perhaps some of the old 70 mm IMAX film reels, which are the size of large kitchen tables.
The museum itself dates back to 1939 when Fort Worth women began studying the idea of a children’s museum. The first one opened in 1945 in De Zavala Elementary School, then two years later expanded at the R.E. Harding House at 1306 Summit Ave.
In 1954, the museum opened at 1501 Montgomery St., followed by the Charlie Mary Noble Planetarium. The current building opened in 2009.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a $1 million grant to the Omni Theater project from the William Scott Foundation.
This story was originally published January 3, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
