You know what's annoying when going to the movies? Sitting behind someone taller than you are, so you have to lean sideways and try to watch the movie around their shoulder. Stadium seating helps somewhat, but it's not perfect, and it also involves a lot of stair-climbing. You know what never has this problem? Planetariums.
It's only tradition, held over from live theatre, that demands movies be shown in the front of the cinema. Let's resdign movie theatres so that instead of being projected on a screen at the front, movies are projected onto a screen held diagonally above the audience, stretching from about the middle of where the screen is now, to a point on the celing above the fourth or fifth row.
I expect this could be done by moving the projector room and putting existing projectors on a tilted table, or with the careful addition of mirrors and lenses.
Make the seats lean way back and give them headrests. We may have to learn to sip soda without seeing the cup, but at least we'll be able to see the movie.-- gisho, Apr 02 2010 isn't this like an Imax theatre? http://www.imax.com/ [xandram, Apr 05 2010] 2001 Complex http://www.ips-plan...les/thirdstage.htmlabout half-way down; search on "2001 Complex" or "MGM Syndrome" [mouseposture, Apr 07 2010] //We may have to learn to sip soda without seeing the cup,//...Hey, that's what bendy straws were made for! Seems like a perfectly good idea to me. Please pass me a clean blanket.-- jurist, Apr 03 2010 Love it! I went to a movie once that was projected on a curved, dome ceiling. It was some kind of IMAX ripoff and it nearly made me sick. But this idea I like.
xandram - IMAX is a film format and doesn't specify where/how large the screen is.-- DIYMatt, Apr 07 2010 Perhaps bakeable as a modification of existing planetariums.
The last planetarium show I saw didn't use the ceiling- screen in the traditional way to simulate the night sky -- it was more of a CGI astronomy documentary -- cratered planets, space ships, explosions, & so on. In other words, an ordinary film projected onto the ceiling, in a theater where the seats leaned way back and had headrests. Not quite an ordinary film, though: the screen spanned 360 degrees in azimuth and about 180 degrees in elevation, and could be viewed from any direction (the seats were arranged in concentric circles), so I suppose the arrangement required special films made to be shown in that format. Special films exploiting ultra-wide planetarium screens seems feasible, to me, though, for any film with an "up" and "down" direction (pretty much any non-astronomy film) you'd have to use only 120 degrees or so of the seating.
Or have a "movie night" at the local planetarium, and show normal films. I, for one, would like to see 2001 that way. <link>-- mouseposture, Apr 07 2010 random, halfbakery