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The 360° Image The Panorama and Diorama   In the late 18th century, installations featuring large painted canvases were a popular form of entertainment. In 1781, the Eidophusikon, created by scenic designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, combined theatrical models and lighting effects with painted panoramas that surrounded the audience. A British portrait painter, Robert Barker, built a round building specially designed to house his 360° canvases. He unveiled his first Panorama, View of Edinburgh, in 1787. Though it was a financial failure, he followed it with View of London, which proved a popular and critical success. Within years, increasingly elaborate panoramas became widespread throughout Europe. Battlefields cityscapes, and scenes from The Bible proved to be especially popular. Barker himself found success with a depiction of a British naval battle that revolved around the audience. Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and Claude-Marie Bouton created the Diorama in 1822. This theater of illusion placed viewers on a revolving floor before three enormous, transparent canvases, each with a scene painted on both sides. By changing the patterns of the theatrical lighting, one scene would dissolve into another. The Photographic Panorama   Panorama photography became popular soon after the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Panoramic photographs were made using a concave mirror, a swing-lens camera, a rotation camera, or by piecing together a mosaic of single images that were shot from a single viewpoint. Landscapes, especially those of the American West, became a prominent theme in panoramic photography. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division has a collection of over 4,000 panoramic photographs. The 360° Moving Image   At the Paris World's Fair of 1900, Raoul Grimoin-Sanson introduced a technique called Cineorama, which used the new medium of motion pictures to surround visitors with imagery captured by ten cameras mounted on a hot air-balloon flying over Paris. Viewers sat in the center of the room, in a recreation of an air-balloon basket. Cineorama audiences were meant to experience the sensation of actually rising into the air. In 1955, Circarama opened in Tomorrowland at Disneyland. Circarama was a 360° film projected on eleven screens that surrounded the audience. It was eventually discovered that the eleven cameras used to capture this imagery did not have the same focal point, which made many audience members complain of motion sickness. The problem was fixed by reducing the number of cameras to nine, each pointing upward into 45 degree angle mirrors. The technique was named CircleVision 360. Forward, Into the Holodeck   Artists and scientists working in the fields of virtual reality and data visualization installations often reference Panoramas and other panoramic techniques as among the inspirations for their work. For example, artist Michael Naimark created a stereoscopic motion video panorama, BeNowHere, in which audience members stand on rotating platform surrounded by stereoscopic video projections of Unesco World Heritage properties. The Cave is an immersive, room-sized, cube-shaped interactive environment which uses real-time computer graphics. It was developed in 1991 by Dan Sandin and Tom DeFanti of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at University of Illinois, and is used worldwide for scientific visualization and artistic projects worldwide. The Panoscope, which surrounds a viewer’s head like a big, metallic donut, is a single-channel digital panoramic viewer from artist Luc Courchesne. Recent experiments with webcams allow imagery to be live rather than recorded.

The website of Hollywood's Vaslavasay Panorama contains a list of historic Panoramas that can be visited today. This list includes the Gettysburg Cyclorama in Pennsylvania and the Panorama Mesdang in The Hague, Netherlands.   The Library of Congress' panoramic photograph collection is online as part of their exhibition Take the Long View..       Michael Naimark's web page about BeNowHere, and an article by Naimark on 3D Panoramas written for the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. About The Cave, from the online exhibition From Wagner to Virtual Reality on ArtMuseum.net PANOSCOPIA: The Panoramic Photography of Luc Courchesne discusses Courchesne's work in connection with the history of panoramic imagery.