It’s not quite the holodeck from “Star Trek,” but it’s definitely a step in that direction.

A statewide consortium has landed a National Science Foundation grant to develop digital media technologies that will create fully immersive environments. Who needs a joystick when a game system could read your body movements? How about creating a virtual world in the corner of your living room as easily as you pop in a DVD?

Those are the kinds of scenarios researchers with the Consortium for Fulldome and Immersive Technology Development are contemplating. The consortium won the $597,220 federal grant to develop hardware and software that would create fully immersive environments inside and outside of domes. The funds come from the NSF’s Partnerships for Innovation program. The goal is to spur technological innovation and create economic development by commercializing technologies and developing work force skills.

The partners in the project (see box) say the grant is a recognition of New Mexico’s leadership in an area with enormous potential for advancing the digital media industry. The University of New Mexico’s Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) has its own small dome and David Beining, associate director of immersive media at ARTS Lab, is the founder of DomeFest, a juried showcase of content from around the world created for domes and held annually, usually in Albuquerque.

Another consortium partner, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, is adding a dome to its new science and technology building. It plans to incorporate it into its digital media program and use it to explore indigenous astronomy and preserve Native stories, said Ann Filemyr, dean of college at IAIA.

The college could develop content for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., which also has a dome, she said. The IAIA dome will have the capacity to move into various angles. That’s unusual, and it opens up more possibilities for how audiences will experience the technology, she said.

There are about 625 domes around the world that are hungry for content, said Jonathan Strawn, head of fulldome production for ARTS Lab. Domes are naturally immersive, added Pradeep Sen, because one’s entire field of view is covered by computer-generated imagery. Sen is the project leader and an assistant professor in UNM’s Electrical & Computer Engineering Department in the School of Engineering. He’s also co-founder of the Advanced Graphics Lab at UNM. The grant will foster the exploration of new ways to produce dome content as well as evaluations of how a team would use a dome to collectively interact with data.

But the idea behind the NSF grant is also to take this immersive technology outside the dome and do what Ed Angel calls “ambient computing.” Angel is chairman of the Santa Fe Complex, a nonprofi t think tank that is a partner on the grant. It brings together creative scientists, technologists and artists to solve complex problems.

Ambient computing means creating immersive environments on almost any surface. Many consortium members met with Microsoft and Google officials last fall when they were here for a workshop on the NSF grant.

“They were really excited about the potential,” Angel said. “Microsoft has been trying to do this with the Xbox, so you don’t need devices to play your games.”

Sen draws parallels to the Internet. In its nascent stages, only a handful of institutions had access to it. When it became scaleable and more affordable, it expanded into people’s homes and offi ces. That spurred waves of innovation and entrepreneurship.