I used to volunteer at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in the Space Odyssey section. They have had one of these systems there for several years now, so

I used to volunteer at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in the Space Odyssey section. They have had one of these systems there for several years now, so one of my main tasks was to present data displayed on the sphere and offer explanations/answer questions. The system we had used about 4 projectors with the sphere, with images synced to make the projections aligned. The set up we had wasn't perfect (it didn't completely cover the bottom pole). However, we had a couple of Wii controllers set up to allow rotation, panning, and timescaling of the projected images, to make up for this. On the whole we had a lot of cool animations to show the visitors and it was really enjoyable showing that data. The biggest problem was getting (younger) visitors to not try to constantly touch the sphere. My understanding is that this system has become very common for museums showing space or earth science content. It is a neat format to use, and individual museums can set up their own controls for setting up individual animations, creating playlists, and setting up controls for manually operating the system if they use it in shows or presentations, etc. If you have your own data you can put in up on the SOS; we were always looking for the cool things that noaa and sometimes other museums would put up.