Ontario Place: Audio-Visual Arrangements and Techniques

Ontario Place is a permanent steel and glass structure rising on steel stilts from the main lagoon amid a number of manmade islands off-shore in Lake Ontario. It is opposite the Canadian National Exhibition grounds of which it is an extension. It consists of five square “pods” and an experimental theater called Cinesphere. Each pod is 88 ft (26.82 m) long, 88 ft (26.82 m) wide and 32 ft (9.75 m) high. Cinesphere is six stories high. Its diameter is 110 ft (33.53 m) and it seats 800 persons in comfortable seats placed on a stadium-type floor. It is of “triodetic” construction similar to the United States pavilion at Expo '67 except that the structure also contains an inner sphere with acoustic treatment between the two forms. Cinesphere is equipped to handle all types of motion pictures in all formats. It contains the Imax projector which utilizes the rolling-loop method of projection with laterally running 70mm film with a 15-perforation “pull-across”; it is illuminated by a 25,000-W xenon light source. The booth also contains two 35/70mm projectors together with a Zeiss-Ikon 16B 16mm projector attachment constructed by Atlantic Films to slide into position in front of a 70mm projector, thereby utilizing the projector's 6-kW light source to project a picture 35 ft (10.67 m) wide.

Print ISSN

0361-4573

Published

1972-03

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J05634