It’s a tough world out there, especially if you’re in the planetarium business and vying for the attention of young minds and their short attention spans.

Video games populate the landscape like so many craters on the moon.

Blockbusters like “Spider-Man 3” sweep in like comets and leave town, trailing dollar signs.

If you’re a planetarium, and you want to stay afloat, you have to find a novel way to compete. That’s why fulldome shows are about to premiere at Mueller Planetarium inside the University of Nebraska State Museum at 14th and U streets.

Fulldome projection systems are new to Nebraska. The closest fulldome digital theaters are in Denver, Chicago and Wichita, Kan. Mueller is the first of Nebraska’s 10 planetariums to install such a projection system.

“It’s the biggest advance in the planetarium’s capabilities since the theater opened 49 years ago,” said planetarium coordinator Jack Dunn.

Attendance hasn’t been what it used to be since the laser light show projector broke last year, he said.

New lasers cost between $14,000 and $22,000 and no money is available. Some past budget cuts at the museum also may have given people the false impression the planetarium is closed, Dunn said.

The fulldome projection system, which uses mirrors instead of expensive lenses, may bring back the crowds, he said, and hopefully raise enough money so that one day the museum can buy new equipment to stage laser light shows again.

The purchase of the fulldome system was made possible by an anonymous donor through the Friends of the University of Nebraska State Museum.

Initial audience reaction, mostly by school groups, has been great, Dunn said.

“Kids sit there and get quiet. It’s a new experience for them,” he added. “Their typical reaction is: ‘Wow! I haven’t seen this before.’”

 Aaron Veleba, a science  teacher at Valley Heights in Blue Rapids, Kan., recently brought a busload  of students to preview a fulldome show about black holes.

“They thought it was awesome,” he said. “They thought it was cool.”

Veleba was impressed, too.

“It has real depth to it as far as the pictures. You get a three-dimensional type of view instead of a two-dimensional view that you see quite a bit of everywhere else,” Veleba said. “It really is a true theater type of an atmosphere as opposed to a planetarium.”

Watching a fulldome show reminds a person of a Star Wars film, and maybe an IMAX experience, but on a smaller scale. Whales swim overhead in a circle.  Monarch butterflies flutter in the trees. Asteroids stream across space.

 Dunn calls it an “immersion” experience; audience members feel like they are part of the unfolding scene, whether it’s on the bottom of the ocean or in some distant part of the universe.

“It gives us something new and exciting that will put people in the seats,”  Dunn said.

Fulldome technology also allows the planetarium to branch out beyond its usual offerings of astronomy shows. One of the first two fulldome features, “Origins of Life,”  deals with the natural history of Earth.

 The fulldome system used by the planetarium was invented by Paul Bourke, a professor at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

Dunn said Bourke’s software program, called “Sphemir,” is the key because it allows planetariums, such as Mueller, with limited budgets and resources, to compete with larger planetariums that have had fulldome shows for years.

“The trick is in the warping software,” Dunn said. “It takes the original image and warps it so that it will project off of the mirror onto the dome.”

And not just any image will do.  Fulldome uses a special format and very detailed images. So TV images won’t work. And neither will HuskerVision.

Reach Algis J. Laukaitis at (402) 473-7243 or alaukaitis@journalstar.com.