Panorama

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This article is an overview of the term Panorama. For other, more specific uses, see Panorama (disambiguation).

In its most general sense, a panorama is any wide view of a physical space. It has also come to refer to a wide-angle representation of such a view — whether in painting, drawing, photography, film/video, or a three-dimensional model. Further, the motion-picture term, pan or panning, is derived from "panorama".

A panoramic photograph of Riddarfjärden in Stockholm. This image shows the curved edges of each segment of the panorama which are due to the warping of the image to conform to the cylindrical projection used to present such a wide angle of view. These edges would normally be cropped so the image can be displayed in a more aesthetically pleasing manner

The word was originally coined by the Irish painter Robert Barker to describe his panoramic paintings of Edinburgh. Shown on a cylindrical surface and viewed from the inside, they were exhibited in London in 1792 as "The Panorama".

In the nineteenth century, panoramic paintings and models became a very popular way to represent landscapes and historical events. The Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne, Switzerland, for example, exhibits a circular painting of 1881 created by Edouard Castres. The painting measures about 10 meters in height with a circumference of more than 100 meters. And the Atlanta Cyclorama, depicting the Civil War Battle of Atlanta and first displayed in 1887, is 42 feet high by 358 feet wide.

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, panoramic cameras using curved film holders employed clockwork drives to scan a line image in an arc to create an image over almost 180 degrees. 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 crude virtual reality movies, using one of many technologies such as Apple Computer's QuickTime VR or Java. A rotating line camera such as the Panoscan allows the capture of very high resolution panoramic images and eliminates the need for image stitching.

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A panorama from multiple images stitched together using Apple Computer's QuickTime VR Authoring Studio.

On rare occasions, panoramic, 360° movies have been constructed for specially designed display spaces — typically at theme parks, world's fairs, and museums. Starting in 1955, Disney has created 360° theaters for its parks and the Swiss Transport Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, features a theater that is a large cylindrical space with an arrangement of screens whose bottom is several meters above the floor. Panoramic systems that are less than 360° around also exist. For example, Cinerama used a curved screen and IMAX movies are projected on a dome above the spectators.

One final form of panoramic representation is digital mapping generated from SRTM data. In these diagrams, a computer calculates the panorama from a given point.