Fulldome Software List 2026: Dome Projection Tools

Software List for Fulldome and Dome Projection — 2026 Edition

The article is written by a human. Mistakes have been edited by AI.
Specifications taken from the vendors’ own websites and checked in July 2026.
The first version of this list had five programs on it. That was an honest reflection of the market at the time — there simply was not much. Six years later the list has tripled, one of the biggest names in the field has changed owner, and the calibration step that used to take an afternoon now takes under two minutes per projector.
Who this article is for: VJs, technical directors and installers who have to get an image onto a curved surface — a planetarium, a mobile dome tent, an immersive room — and need to know which software actually does the job. Not for planetarium educators looking for astronomy lesson content.
What it solves: dome software is a small, fragmented market with almost no honest comparisons. Most lists mix €200 VJ tools with €200,000 planetarium systems as if they were alternatives.
What you get by the end: the tools split into four honest groups by what they are for, current capabilities from the vendors themselves, and a clear view of where this niche is heading.
Hello dear VJs and clients of LIME ART GROUP. I am new media artist Alexander Kuiava. Since 2012 our studio has produced over 100 VJ Loops Packs, including a dedicated fulldome library, so we have had to render into most of the pipelines below.

Before the software: what a dome actually demands

Three things decide everything else, and getting them wrong makes the software choice irrelevant.

One projector or several

There are two ways to fill a dome. A single projector with a fisheye lens placed at the centre is the cheap route — it works for small domes and tight budgets, and the software requirement is minimal. The trade-off is resolution: one projector stretched across the whole hemisphere gives you soft, dim pixels.

The professional route is multiple projectors, typically five around the circumference plus one for the zenith, though installations range far wider than that. VIOSO states it has handled domes from 2 to 55 metres in diameter using anywhere from 2 to 50 projectors. This is where warping, edge blending and colour matching stop being optional and become the entire job.

The domemaster format

Dome content is not widescreen. The native format is a domemaster: a square frame with a circular fisheye image inside it, usually rendered on a 180° hemisphere with the lower edge of the image at the horizon.

Standard resolutions in use today:

Which one you need is not a matter of taste. It depends on dome diameter, projector count and how close the audience sits. A 4K master on a 20-metre dome will look soft; an 8K master on a 6-metre inflatable is wasted render time and unnecessary playback load.

Camera-based calibration changed the economics

The single biggest practical change since the last version of this article is automatic calibration. You mount a camera, the software projects test patterns, measures the actual geometry of your dome and generates the warp and blend maps for every projector.

VIOSO states its patented calibration handles an entire dome in under two minutes per projector, including blending, geometric correction and colour matching. Anyone who aligned a six-projector dome by hand knows what that number means. It is the difference between a one-day install and a three-day install, and it is why multi-projector domes have become viable for far smaller venues.

Group 1. Dome VJ and mapping tools

Software for artists who perform or map live. Affordable, learnable, and the right starting point unless you are commissioning a planetarium.

Blendy Dome VJ

Platform: macOS
Developed by StudioAvante together with United VJs, and still the most direct answer to “I want to VJ in a dome.”

It is a realtime domemaster slicer: you feed it a domemaster, it performs the distortion needed for the curved surface and sends the output to up to six projectors. It reads any Syphon source, which is the important part — you run Resolume, VDMX, Modul8 or TouchDesigner as your content engine and let Blendy handle the dome geometry. Their own line is “no dome, no problem”, because you can preview content on a virtual 3D dome before you ever get into the venue.

The honest limitation: macOS only, six projectors is the ceiling, and it is a live tool rather than a show-control system. For a planetarium running scheduled programmes it is the wrong shape of tool.

Use it if: you perform live in domes, or you want to rehearse dome content at your desk.

Omnidome

Platform: Windows, macOS, Linux · Free and open source
Arbitrary surface projection mapping — you map any physical room and project virtual content back onto it, turning a space of any shape into a 360° environment. It works natively with Syphon and with performance software that connects to it, and the source is on GitHub.

The honest limitation: open-source project pace. Development is not on a commercial schedule, and support is community-based. Check the current state of the repository before you commit a paid job to it.

Use it if: budget is zero, you are experimenting, or you are on Linux where the commercial options thin out fast.

Sparck

Platform: Cross-platform · By tecARTlab
Spatial augmented reality rather than dome-specific: project real-time generated content onto physical space of any shape. Aimed at installation and interactive work. Worth knowing if your “dome” is actually an irregular immersive room rather than a hemisphere.

Resolume Arena and MadMapper

Neither is a dome tool, but both appear in real dome rigs constantly, and it is worth being precise about why.

Resolume Arena handles the content — clips, layers, effects, audio reactivity — and its Advanced Output does slicing and warping that can cover simple dome setups. For anything with real curvature and multiple projectors you pass its output over Spout or Syphon into a dedicated dome tool.

MadMapper is a genuine mapping engine with mesh warping and masks, and people do map domes with it. It has no automatic camera calibration, so you are placing points by hand.

The pattern to copy: content engine → frame sharing → dome warping tool → projectors. Almost every working dome rig looks like that.

Group 2. Calibration and warping systems

Not creative tools. These sit between your content and your projectors and make the image geometrically correct. Application-independent, so they work under whatever you already run.

VIOSO

Platform: Windows
The reference for dome calibration, and the vendor with the clearest published numbers. Patented camera-based calibration covering blending, geometric correction and colour matching in under two minutes per projector. Experience stated across domes from 2 to 55 metres and 2 to 50 projectors, with stable alignment, high brightness and 3D support.

It integrates as a warping layer beneath other software rather than replacing it, and it appears inside third-party products — AV Stumpfl’s Wings AV Suite documents VIOSO dome projection directly.

Use it if: you have more than two projectors and any commercial obligation to make the seams invisible.

Scalable Display

Platform: Windows
Camera-based automatic warping and blending across many projectors from a single machine, application-independent. Long-established in permanent installations, where the value is not the first alignment but the ability to re-align without flying a technician out.

7thSense

Platform: Proprietary servers
High-end media servers built for domes, planetariums and immersive attractions. This is the tier where the server, the warping and the show control arrive as one specified system.

Screenberry

Platform: Windows
A media server with a dedicated fulldome and planetarium solution — playback, warping, blending and multi-projector output in one system. A newer name than VIOSO or 7thSense and worth adding to any shortlist, particularly for installations that want server and calibration from a single vendor.

Group 3. Planetarium show systems

A different category of product entirely: astronomy simulation, show playback, device control and scheduling in one platform, sold with the building. If you are a VJ, you will meet these as the system you must deliver content into, not as something you choose.

Digistar

The oldest name in the field. Created by Evans & Sutherland and released in 1983 as the first computer-graphics planetarium projection system, it moved to full-dome video from Digistar 3 onwards. The vendor states it is used by over 700 planetariums worldwide, and the product now sits under Cosm following the acquisition of Evans & Sutherland — the single biggest ownership change in this sector in years.

DigitalSky

Sky-Skan’s platform. DigitalSky Dark Matter is a cluster-based system combining programmable science simulation, fulldome video playback, external device control and show performance control in one interface.

ZEISS UNIVIEW

The specification here is the most explicit of the group: stereo projection, 8K performance, 10-bit per RGB channel colour depth for smooth gradients, and frame rates up to 120 fps in stereo. ZEISS also points to HEVC encoding to reduce compression artefacts in fulldome video while saving storage — a genuinely useful detail if you are the one delivering the files.

SkyExplorer

From RSA Cosmos, part of Konica Minolta. Real-time astronomical rendering using physically based rendering techniques, with interactive tools for building shows. Positioned for digital and hybrid planetariums.

Group 4. Making the content

A dome is only as good as what plays in it, and this is where most VJs actually spend their time.

Blender

Free and open source. Blender’s Cycles renderer supports fisheye cameras directly, which makes it the most accessible route into fulldome production. You do have to set dome-safe field of view and clipping planes manually. The Fulldome Pro add-on exists specifically to simplify domemaster setup and is free.

A common production pattern: render equirectangular in Cycles, then re-project to fisheye in a compositing pass.

TouchDesigner

The choice for generative systems, camera-reactive content and long-running installations that must not visibly repeat. The community has built dome previsualisation environments — the open-source Fulldome-PREVIZ project provides a fisheye previz setup for half-sphere domes, so you can judge composition before you are standing under a real dome.

Notch

Real-time fulldome output is supported natively, which makes Notch the first choice when a show is live and parameters have to flex during the performance rather than being baked into a file.

After Effects and Cinema 4D

Still in the pipeline for 2D elements, titles and finishing. Neither is dome-aware by default — you work in a square domemaster canvas and rely on previz to judge how the composition reads once it is wrapped overhead.

Sources

Specifications and figures were taken from the vendors’ own websites and from published market research, checked in July 2026.

Official product sources

• VIOSO — vioso.com
• Blendy Dome VJ — blendydomevj.com
• Omnidome — omnido.me
• Screenberry — screenberry.com
• Digistar / Cosm Technology — tech.cosm.com
• Sky-Skan DigitalSky — skyskan.com
• ZEISS UNIVIEW — zeiss.com
• SkyExplorer / Konica Minolta — konicaminolta.com
• Scalable Display — scalabledisplay.com
• 7thSense — 7thsense.one
• Blender — blender.org
• TouchDesigner / Derivative — derivative.ca
• Notch — notch.one

Market research and community references

• Immersive dome projection market projections — Dataintelo
• Fulldome planetarium growth estimates — published industry forecasts
• Fulldome-PREVIZ previsualisation project — GitHub
• Fulldome Pro Blender add-on — blender-addons.org

Composition guidance and workflow observations are drawn from our own fulldome production experience.

Content is still king

A dome is the most impressive display surface in the industry and the least forgiving. Every compression artefact, every badly composed frame and every panic-fast camera move is magnified across a surface that fills the entire field of view of everyone in the room.

Since 2012 we have produced over 100 VJ Loops Packs, delivered in both Mov ProRes and Mov DXV, in resolutions from Full HD to 8K, shipped from three separate locations. Our fulldome library is rendered as proper square domemasters rather than reformatted widescreen clips, because reformatted widescreen never looks right overhead and everyone in a dome can tell.

If you are building a dome show, start with the fulldome visuals collection. For immersive rooms that are not hemispheres, the immersive visuals category covers walls and irregular surfaces, and the monochrome video mapping loops double as masks in any of the tools above.

If we have missed a tool, tell us and we will add it — this list is meant to stay alive.