AutoYokes play a starring role in a planetarium show at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, CT, where a 150ft-wide planetarium dome rises about three stories into the air. Each AutoYoke is fitted with a mirror system and paired with a Vicom Wega 1200 slide projector. Images of clouds, stars and moons are projected onto the mirrors, and the mirrors move as the AutoYokes pan and tilt - making the clouds drift, the stars shoot, and the moons rise and fall.
"We installed 17 AutoYokes in August, and they are working very well," says Hank Forrest, senior associate principal at Fisher Marantz Stone, the show’s main designer. "The whole environment turned out to be smokier and dirtier than we expected, but it hasn’t affected the AutoYokes at all. They’ve been really reliable."
"The post-construction settling of the building introduced a lot of fine construction dust into the air," adds Patrick O’Leary, production manager at Staging Techniques, the company which supplied the AutoYokes. "It created some issues, but we had no problems with the AutoYokes."
(Lee Baldock)
