Atlas9, a new upscale immersive art experience in Kansas City, KS, has been named No. 2 on USA Today’s list of the top 10 best new attractions of 2026. Conceived, designed, and integrated by experience design firm Dimensional Innovations (DI), Atlas9 elevates the idea of an experiential environment by leveraging DI’s decades of experience working with some of the biggest names in entertainment. DI chose Christie projection technology to power the immersive theater.
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Atlas9 is set inside a fictitious 1990’s cinema, with interactive rooms and advanced gamification. Guests enter the 46,000-square-foot “theater” to discover that, as a result of a projection experiment gone awry, stories from within film reels have come alive. Guests investigate the events and anomalies in the theatre, exploring the rooms and corridors as the narrative unfolds.
The catalyst for this experience came from DI’s CEO, Tucker Trotter, and brought DI and its sister company, DI Build, together with partners including Infinity Sign System, Swell Spark, Perspective Architecture + Design, and Homefield to showcase the company’s impressive capabilities. The inspiration for the project stems from DI’s roots in movie theater design and fabrication.
DI engaged Christie early in the project timeline for Atlas9, working closely with Paul Dumpel, Christie senior sales manager, and the Christie team to bring the project's design intent to life. DI selected Christie projection technology in two rooms at Atlas9, including Auditorium No. 9, a 240-seat immersive theater with audience-triggered on-screen moments controlled by four “best seats in the house.”
“Guests interact in real time with the content that is on screen,” explained John Coovert, solutions engineer manager, DI. “Some of the seats allow you to play Pong, and another seat allows you to do some fun rendering on the screen via a joystick in the top of a cup that's in the cup holder.”
Five 4K22-HS Series laser projectors are used in Auditorium No. 9, paired with Christie Mystique for automated alignment on a highly bespoke screen, creating a system dubbed “Holomax” within the Atlas9 storyline.
The second room, the Headshot Remixer, stylizes visitors into frame black-and-white Hollywood-style headshots. “We capture your photo when you come into Atlas9, and when you go into the headshot remixer, it’s a kind of ‘cinematic anomaly’ that occurs in there. It shows your face projected onto the wall, and then it starts to remix your face with the previous three, four, or five people who have gone through the space previously,” said Coovert.
Two Christie 4K1600-JS projectors with ultra short throw lenses power the experience. Bringing an experience of this size, scale, and complexity is a tremendous undertaking, but “being able to have good partners like Christie to tap into and really help bring all the excitement that is Atlas9 to life has been fantastic,” said Coovert.
