Panorama

The word was coined in the 18th century[1] by the English (Irish descent) painter Robert Barker to describe his panoramic paintings of Edinburgh and London.

The device of the panorama existed in painting, particularly in murals, as early as 20 A.D., in those found in Pompeii,[4] as a means of generating an immersive "panoptic" experience of a vista.

Cartographic experiments during the Enlightenment era preceded European panorama painting and contributed[5] to a formative impulse toward panoramic vision and depiction.

The earliest that the word "panorama" appeared in print was on June 11, 1791, in the British newspaper The Morning Chronicle, referring to this visual spectacle.

[8] Barker created a painting, shown on a cylindrical surface and viewed from the inside, giving viewers a vantage point encompassing the entire circle of the horizon, rendering the original scene with high fidelity.

By 1793, Barker had built "The Panorama" rotunda at the center of London's entertainment district in Leicester Square, where it remained attracting visitors for 70 years, then closing in 1863,[9] before being converted into the church of Notre Dame de France.

Inventor Sir Francis Ronalds developed a machine to remove errors in perspective that were created when a sequence of planar sketches was combined into a cylinder.

They could run autonomously with silent synchronization pulses to control projector advance and fades, recorded beside an audio voice-over or music track.

Such stitched images may even be fashioned into forms of virtual reality movies, using technologies such as QuickTime VR, Flash, Java, or even JavaScript.

Starting in 1955, Disney has created 360° theaters for its parks[20] and the Swiss Transport Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, features a theatre that is a large cylindrical space with an arrangement of screens whose bottom is several metres above the floor.