Our new Vidarium dome

The relaxation dome has become the Vidarium dome.

This place was and is a place of innovation: the concept is just as innovative and unique as the first film: a projektion dome in a spa. It enables a completely new form of relaxation with open eyes. A place where you could experience immersion for the first time, completely immersing yourself in the images as you lie on your back and gaze into the infinite horizon of the video dome. We have found a name for this concept, which now also applies to the former relaxation dome as part of the redesign: VIDARIUM. The name "Vidarium" is a neologism of "video" and "-arium". The Latin word "video" means "I see" and stands for the 360° videos that are projected onto the dome. Finally, the suffix "-arium" refers to the place where the Vidarium is located: the thermal baths in Bad Aibling. In ancient Rome, it was customary to refer to the rooms in the thermae, the ancient baths, with words that all ended in "-arium": The Frigidarium was the cold bath, the Tepidarium the medium temperature bath and the Caldarium the hot bath. The Vidarium is an immersive experience space. The term immersion also goes back to the Latin: "immergere" means "to immerse" and here refers to immersion in videos, stories and atmospheres. The Vidarium Bad Aibling is one of the largest planetariums in Bavaria, the third largest planetarium in Bavaria to be precise, and the only one between Munich and Salzburg. Vidarium is therefore the "bath for seeing", the "picture bath", here you can, as it were, "bathe or immerse yourself in pictures". The motto of the Bad Aibling thermal spa, "Enjoy with all your senses", can be experienced here in a whole new dimension: of course you can still relax in the Vidarium - but that´s not all. It offers much more: Here you von bathe in images, dream and marvel at the beauty of the world and the secrets of the cosmos, here you can not only hear music but also see it, immerse yourself in shapes, colours and movements, always enveloped by the fantastic 360° video projections in the dome. Vidarium is a video projection dome. The technology used here is similar to that used in planetariums: 7 video projectors project a 135 m² continuous image onto the inside of the 11 metre diameter dome. The overlapping of the individual projectors can no longer be seen in the final result. Around 50 million pixels produce a brillant picture in 8k and the 5.1 surround audio system provides spatial sound to accompany the picture. 360° films are projected, which are specially produced for such domes. From a technical point of view, the produktion of the films represents a special challenge, as you are no longer working on a two-dimensional, rectangular surface, but in three-dimensional spherical space. The projected image is threfore not rectangular, but circular, whereby the images are distorted so that they appear straight and upright again in the projection. A planetarium system is also installed in the projection system, which can be used to simulate the sky and the movement of the stars at any time and any place on earth. This means that the planetarium system can not only show a realistic simulation of the starry sky over Bad Aibling, but can also take you on journeys through our solar system and the Milky Way to the limits of the universe. First and foremost, it remains a place where you can relax in an innovative way. Not by sleeping, but by keeping your eyes open and letting yourself fall into the calm flow of images, in keeping with the motto: Open your eyes and relax.