Student-Created MindSpace Show Dazzles at City Park Planetarium

The Planetarium in the City Park glows brightly, visible from afar. Inside, the grand star theater is about one-third full. Colorful shapes, illustrations, and animated buildings shift across the dome, accompanied by music, immersive soundscapes, and spoken narration. The name of this show: MindSpace.

Loosely translated, MindSpace means "thought space." The 72-minute fulldome production was developed by students from our university in collaboration with the Planetarium. A fulldome show is an immersive, dome-based 360-degree projection experience, where films or animations are displayed across the entire inner surface of a dome.

MindSpace will be presented again at the Planetarium on January 15, 2026. Tickets are available here.

The project premiered on May 14, 2025, and is now being shown to the public for the first time, with another performance scheduled for January 2026. "The planetarium can offer more than just stars," emphasizes Dr. Björn Voss, director of the Planetarium. It should also be a space for video art, innovation, and creative expression.

Students Create Fulldome Art

Sixteen students from the Communication Design, Sound/Vision, and Media Technology programs spent eight months developing the 72-minute fulldome show. Conceptually, they explored how people perceive the world and themselves: What happens inside our minds? And what occupies that space?

What began as a vague idea in an October 2024 meeting evolved into a project with eight distinct chapters. The team worked with real-time interactive 3D visuals, 360-degree cameras, and 3D soundscapes distributed across 64 speakers in the theater. The final video file totaled around 780 gigabytes.

Prof. Dr. Marco Grimm and Prof. Thomas Görne, both instructors at our university, supervised the project. Grimm notes that it was a major challenge for the students, as they had to create 360-degree visuals for the entire dome while integrating 3D audio.

For their creative work, the students were awarded the Ditze Prize, an annual grant from the Karl H. Ditze Foundation recognizing outstanding student projects. Máte Bredaň, a student and project lead for MindSpace, says they now plan to submit the work to various festivals, including the Fulldome Festival in Brno and Jena. The prize money will help fund travel to these events.

A Journey in Eight Chapters

The first chapter opens with fundamental questions: "What are memories made of?" "Do we have an inner eye?" "What happens deep inside our minds?" Abstract images unfold, evoking the sensation of a film playing before the mind's eye.

Subsequent chapters explore these questions from different angles, examining influences that shape our thinking—such as the constant consumption of social media. The show features 360-degree footage of Hamburg at night and surreal forest landscapes. Movement, light, abstraction, and shifting perspectives play a central role in many segments.

At times, the production returns to space and constellations, motifs familiar from classic planetarium programs. Audiences discover the Asian and Australian night skies, gaining a sense of how long humanity has been captivated by the stars. The chapters weave external impressions with inner processes, turning the gaze inward toward our own "thought space."