![Panorama of the courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Panorama_of_the_courtyard_of_the_Great_Mosque_of_Kairouan.jpg)
A panorama (formed from
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "view") is any
wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in
painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...
,
drawing,
photography
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employe ...
,
film,
seismic images, or
3D modeling. The word was originally coined in the 18th century by the English
(Irish descent) painter
Robert Barker to describe his
panoramic paintings of
Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian on the southern shore of t ...
and
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
. The motion-picture term
''panning'' is derived from ''panorama''.
A panoramic view is also purposed for multimedia, cross-scale applications to an outline overview (from a distance) along and across repositories. This so-called "cognitive panorama" is a panoramic view over, and a combination of,
cognitive space A cognitive model is an approximation of one or more cognitive processes in humans or other animals for the purposes of comprehension and prediction. There are many types of cognitive models, and they can range from box-and-arrow diagrams to a set o ...
s used to capture the larger scale.
History
The device of the panorama existed in painting, particularly in
mural
A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage.
Word mural in art
The word ''mural'' is a Spani ...
s, as early as 20 A.D., in those found in
Pompeii, as a means of generating an immersive "
panoptic
The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be o ...
" experience of a
vista
Vista usually refers to a distant view.
Vista may also refer to:
Software
*Windows Vista, the line of Microsoft Windows client operating systems released in 2006 and 2007
* VistA, (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) ...
.
Cartographic
Cartography (; from grc, χάρτης , "papyrus, sheet of paper, map"; and , "write") is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality (or an im ...
experiments during the
Enlightenment era preceded European
panorama painting and contributed to a formative impulse toward panoramic vision and depiction.
This novel perspective was quickly conveyed to America by
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin ( April 17, 1790) was an American polymath who was active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher. Encyclopædia Britannica, Wood, 2021 Among the leading inte ...
who was present for the first manned balloon flight by the
Montgolfier brothers
The Montgolfier brothers – Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (; 26 August 1740 – 26 June 1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (; 6 January 1745 – 2 August 1799) – were aviation pioneers, balloonists and paper manufacturers from the commune A ...
in 1783, and by the American-born physician,
John Jeffries
John Jeffries (5 February 1744 – 16 September 1819) was an American physician, scientist, and military surgeon with the British Army in Nova Scotia and New York during the American Revolution. He is best known for accompanying French invent ...
who had joined French aeronaut
Jean Pierre Blanchard
Jean-Pierre rançoisBlanchard (4 July 1753 – 7 March 1809) was a French inventor, best known as a pioneer of gas balloon flight, who distinguished himself in the conquest of the air in a balloon, in particular the first crossing of the Englis ...
on flights over
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
and the first aerial crossing of the
English Channel
The English Channel, "The Sleeve"; nrf, la Maunche, "The Sleeve" (Cotentinais) or ( Jèrriais), (Guernésiais), "The Channel"; br, Mor Breizh, "Sea of Brittany"; cy, Môr Udd, "Lord's Sea"; kw, Mor Bretannek, "British Sea"; nl, Het Kana ...
in 1785.
As popular spectacle
In the mid-19th century,
panoramic paintings and models became a very popular way to represent
landscapes
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the p ...
, topographic views and
historical events. Audiences of Europe in this period were thrilled by the aspect of illusion,
immersed in a winding 360-degree panorama and given the impression of standing in a new environment. The ''panorama'' was a
360-degree visual medium patented under the title ''Apparatus for Exhibiting Pictures'' by the artist
Robert Barker in 1787. The earliest that the word "panorama" appeared in print was on June 11, 1791, in the British newspaper ''
The Morning Chronicle
''The Morning Chronicle'' was a newspaper founded in 1769 in London. It was notable for having been the first steady employer of essayist William Hazlitt as a political reporter and the first steady employer of Charles Dickens as a journalist. It ...
'', referring to this visual spectacle. 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. The inaugural exhibition, a "View of Edinburgh" (specifically the view from the summit of
Calton Hill
Calton Hill () is a hill in central Edinburgh, Scotland, situated beyond the east end of Princes Street and included in the city's UNESCO World Heritage Site. Views of, and from, the hill are often used in photographs and paintings of the cit ...
), was first shown in that city in 1788, then transported to London in 1789. 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, before being converted into the church of
Notre Dame de France
Notre Dame de France is a French Catholic church in London's Soho. It is located on Leicester Place just north of Leicester Square.
History
The origins of the church date back to the mid 1800s, however, the building itself is older. In 1861, ...
.
Inventor Sir
Francis Ronalds
Sir Francis Ronalds FRS (21 February 17888 August 1873) was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph over a substantial distance. In 1816 ...
developed a machine to remove errors in
perspective that were created when a sequence of planar sketches was combined into a cylinder. It also projected the cylindrical drawing onto the wall of the rotunda at much larger scale to enable its accurate painting. The apparatus was exhibited at the
Royal Polytechnic Institution
, mottoeng = The Lord is our Strength
, type = Public
, established = 1838: Royal Polytechnic Institution 1891: Polytechnic-Regent Street 1970: Polytechnic of Central London 1992: University of Westminster
, endowment = £5.1 million ...
in the early 1840s.
Large scale installations enhance the illusion for an audience of being surrounded with a real landscape. The
Bourbaki Panorama
The Bourbaki Panorama is a circular panoramic painting depicting the internment of the French Armée de l'Est in neutral Switzerland at the end of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. The army, led by General Charles-Denis Bourbaki had been defe ...
in
Lucerne,
Switzerland was created by
Edouard Castres in 1881. The painting measures about 10 metres in height with a
circumference
In geometry, the circumference (from Latin ''circumferens'', meaning "carrying around") is the perimeter of a circle or ellipse. That is, the circumference would be the arc length of the circle, as if it were opened up and straightened out t ...
of 112 meters. In the same year of 1881, the
Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
marine painter
Hendrik Willem Mesdag
Hendrik Willem Mesdag (23 February 1831 – 10 July 1915) was a Dutch marine painter.
Biography
He was born in Groningen, the son of the banker Klaas Mesdag and his wife Johanna Wilhelmina van Giffen. Mesdag was encouraged by his fath ...
created and established the
Panorama Mesdag of
The Hague
The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital o ...
,
Netherlands
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
, a cylindrical painting more than 14 metres high and roughly 40 meters in diameter (120 meters in circumference). In the United States of America is the
Atlanta Cyclorama
The Atlanta Cyclorama and Civil War Museum was a American Civil War, Civil War museum located in Atlanta, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. Its most noted attraction was the Atlanta Cyclorama, a cylindrical panoramic painting of the Battle of Atlanta ...
, depicting the
Civil War
A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country).
The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies ...
Battle of Atlanta
The Battle of Atlanta was a battle of the Atlanta Campaign fought during the American Civil War on July 22, 1864, just southeast of Atlanta, Georgia. Continuing their summer campaign to seize the important rail and supply hub of Atlanta, Un ...
. It was first displayed in 1887, and is 42 feet high by 358 feet circumference (13 x 109 metres). Also on a gigantic scale, and still extant, is the
Racławice Panorama
The ''Racławice Panorama'' (Polish: ''Panorama Racławicka'') is a monumental (15 × 114 meter) cycloramic painting depicting the Battle of Racławice, during the Kościuszko Uprising. It is located in Wrocław, Poland. The painting is one of ...
(1893) located in
Wrocław
Wrocław (; german: Breslau, or . ; Silesian German: ''Brassel'') is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the River Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, rou ...
,
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...
, which measures 15 x 120 metres. In addition to these historical examples, there have been panoramas painted and installed in modern times; prominent among these is the
Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles, California (2004).
Photographs
Panoramic photography soon came to displace painting as the most common method for creating wide views. Not long after the introduction of the
Daguerreotype in 1839, photographers began assembling multiple images of a view into a single wide image. In the late 19th century, flexible film enabled the construction of panoramic cameras using curved film holders and clockwork drives to rotate the lens in an arc and thus scan an image encompassing almost 180 degrees.
Pinhole cameras of a variety of constructions can be used to make panoramic images. A popular design is the "oatmeal box", a vertical cylindrical container in which the pinhole is made in one side and the film or photographic paper is wrapped around the inside wall opposite, and extending almost right to the edge of, the pinhole. This generates an egg-shaped image with more than 180° view.
Popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but now superseded by digital presentation software,
Multi-image (also known as multi-image slide presentations,
slide show
A slide show (slideshow) is a presentation of a series of still images ( slides) on a projection screen or electronic display device, typically in a prearranged sequence. The changes may be automatic and at regular intervals or they may be manu ...
s or diaporamas)
35mm slide projections onto one or more screens characteristically lent themselves to the wide screen panorama. They could run autonomously with silent synchronization pulses to control projector advance and fades, recorded beside an
audio
Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to:
Sound
* Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound
*Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum
* Digital audio, representation of sou ...
voice-over
Voice-over (also known as off-camera or off-stage commentary) is a production technique where a voice—that is not part of the narrative (non- diegetic)—is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentation ...
or music
track. Precisely overlapping slides placed in slide mounts with soft-edge density masks would merge seamlessly on the screen to create the panorama. Cutting and dissolving between sequential images generated animation effects in the panorama format.
VR photographs
Digital photography of the late twentieth century greatly simplified this assembly process, which is now known as ''image stitching''. Such stitched images may even be fashioned into forms of
virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...
movies, using technologies such as
QuickTime VR
QuickTime VR (also known as QTVR) is an image file format developed by Apple Inc. for QuickTime, and discontinued along with QuickTime 7. It allows the creation and viewing of VR photography, photographically captured panoramas, and the viewing ...
,
Flash
Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
Fictional aliases
* Flash (DC Comics character), several DC Comics superheroes with super speed:
** Flash (Barry Allen)
** Flash (Jay Garrick)
** Wally West, the first Kid F ...
,
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
, or even
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
. A
rotating line camera such as the
Panoscan allows the capture of high resolution panoramic images and eliminates the need for
image stitching, but immersive "spherical" panorama movies (that incorporate a full 180° vertical viewing angle as well as 360° around) must be made by stitching multiple images. Stitching images together can be used to create extremely high resolution
gigapixel
A gigapixel image is a digital image bitmap composed of one billion (109) pixels (picture elements), 1000 times the information captured by a 1 megapixel digital camera. A square image of 31,623 pixels in width and height is one gigapixel. Cu ...
panoramic images.
Motion picture
On rare occasions, 360° panoramic movies have been constructed for specially designed display spaces—typically at
theme park
An amusement park is a park that features various attractions, such as rides and games, as well as other events for entertainment purposes. A theme park is a type of amusement park that bases its structures and attractions around a central ...
s,
world's fair
A world's fair, also known as a universal exhibition or an expo, is a large international exhibition designed to showcase the achievements of nations. These exhibitions vary in character and are held in different parts of the world at a specif ...
s, and museums. Starting in 1955,
Disney
The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...
has created
360° theaters for its parks and the
Swiss Transport Museum
The Swiss Museum of Transport or Verkehrshaus der Schweiz (literally "Transportation House of Switzerland") in Lucerne opened in July 1959 and exhibits all forms of transport including trains, automobiles, ships and aircraft as well as communicati ...
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. Panoramic systems that are less than 360° around also exist. For example,
Cinerama
Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporati ...
used a very wide curved screen, with three synchronized projectors, and
IMAX Dome / OMNIMAX movies are projected on a dome above the spectators.
Non-photographic representations
Panoramic representation can be generated from
digital elevation models
A digital elevation model (DEM) or digital surface model (DSM) is a 3D computer graphics representation of elevation data to represent terrain or overlaying objects, commonly of a planet, moon, or asteroid. A "global DEM" refers to a discrete g ...
such as
SRTM. In these diagrams, a panorama from any given point can be generated and imaged from the data.
[Fedorov, R., Fraternali, P., & Tagliasacchi, M. (2014, November). Mountain peak identification in visual content based on coarse digital elevation models. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis for Ecological Data (pp. 7-11). ACM.]
See also
*
Circle-Vision
*
Comparison of photo stitching software
*
Cyclorama
A cyclorama is a panoramic image on the inside of a cylindrical platform, designed to give viewers standing in the middle of the cylinder a 360° view, and also a building designed to show a panoramic image. The intended effect is to make view ...
*
Diorama
*
EveryScape
EveryScape is an online mapping service based in Waltham, Massachusetts that allows users to view panoramic images from various locations and is a competitor of Google Street View, Google's Street View service.
History
EveryScape was founded in ...
*
Google Street View
Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expan ...
*
International Panorama Council The International Panorama Council (IPC) is a nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization, subject to Swiss law. It is a global network involving museum directors, managers, artists, restorers and historians who deal with the historical or the cont ...
*
Leme panoramic camera
*
Moving panorama
The moving panorama was an innovation on panoramic painting in the mid-nineteenth century. It was among the most popular forms of entertainment in the world, with hundreds of panoramas constantly on tour in the United Kingdom, the United States, a ...
*
Multi-image
*
Omnidirectional camera
In photography, an omnidirectional camera (from "omni", meaning all), also known as 360-degree camera, is a camera having a field of view that covers approximately the entire sphere or at least a full circle in the horizontal plane.
Omnidirection ...
*
Panoramic painting
*
Panoramic photography
Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as ''wide format photography''. The term has also been applied to ...
*
Panoramic tripod head {{unreferenced, date=July 2018
A panoramic tripod head is a piece of photographic equipment, mounted to a tripod, which allows photographers to shoot a sequence of images around the entrance pupil of a lens that can be used to produce a panorama. ...
*
Route panorama
Route panorama is a continuous 2D image that includes all the scenes visible from a route, as it first appeared in Zheng and Tsuji's work of panoramic views in 1990.
Overview
Different from a local panorama at a static viewpoint, a digital route ...
*
Widescreen
Widescreen images are displayed within a set of aspect ratios (relationship of image width to height) used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than t ...
References
Further reading
* Altick, Richard (1978). ''The Shows of London''. Harvard University Press. , 9780674807310
*
* Garrison, Laurie et al., editors (2013). ''Panoramas, 1787–1900 Texts and contexts'' Five volumes, 2,000pp. Pickering and Chatto.
* Marsh, John L. "Drama and Spectacle by the Yard: The Panorama in America." ''Journal of Popular Culture'' 10, no. 3 (1976): 581–589.
* Oettermann, Stephan (1997). ''The Panorama: History of a mass medium. ''MIT Press. , 9780942299830
* Oleksijczuk, Denise (2011). ''The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism. ''University of Minnesota Press. ,
External links
*
Peak finder
{{Authority control
Panorama photography
Photography by genre