The PANORAMA
was one of the first forms of illusionary space
entertainments. In a sense the first
virtual spectacle.
The first public Panoramic entertainments
were created in London at the end
of the 18th century.
An enormous painted canvas
attached to the inside of a rotunda
revolved slowly round the spectators
seated in the center.
Placed in semi-darkness, the audience
gazed across a gulf of about 12ft.
at a continuous moving picture
which was lit from above.
The subjects shown were mostly battle scenes
or spectacular panoramic landscape views,
which the audience often followed
by means of printed plans
sold as programs. *
The essential effect was of
an expansive, omniscient view of the represented
physical space; a quasi-illusion (with the proper
suspension of disbelief), to the possibility
of a disembodied presence.
The techniques and qualities
of the panorama progressed
and by the beginning of the 19th century
were surpassed by the
DIORAMA.
Invented by Daguerre,
the pioneer of the photographic process,
the Diorama used gigantic transparencies
and more sophisticated lighting
to create greater and greater
suggestions/illusions of depth and of distance,
and to imitate the passage of time....
But the essential idea,
the creation of a spectacular, illusionary space,
a 'virtual space', remained the same.
It's only natural then to further the tradition
by joining the Panorama with
3-D optical effects.
Since spatial recognition in humans
is formed via the offset position of the eyes,
each eye therefore seeing a slightly different
aspect of the same image,
it is then composed in the brain
into a depth perception.
It was clear that re-creating such an offset
photographically
would allow for a similar recomposition
and depth creation.
This desire to push the flat 2-D film surface into a spatial illusion
goes back to the earliest days of
photography and motion pictures. The
Stereoscopic photograph,
a scene photographed through twin-lenses
and viewed through a binocular-type viewer,
was the first to exploit this idea.
Stereoscopic motion-pictures
were being experimented with as early as 1897,
the same year the Lumière Brothers
were making their first motion picture
projections in Paris.
The technique involves a method
of not only making separate images
of the same object,
but also a method of maintaining that separation
so that each eye receives only one aspect
of the image.
Various methods have been employed,
but one of the earliest, and in a sense,
one of the most strikingly beautiful
even in it's un-recomposed form,
is achieved through the use of
color-filtration. Specifically
blue and red filters
produce a blue and red over-lapping image
which, when viewed through filtered glasses,
are complimentary and self-canceling.
Thus the 'red' eye will see the image
displaced one way
and the 'blue' eye the other.
[A method used widely in both
thriller-adventure films
and adventure comic books of the Fifties.]
...and the brain,
the great rationalizer,
considers this a problem of displacement in space
and recomposes the image into a
virtual depth.
* Notes on the Panorama and Diorama were from:
The Archaeology of the Cinema, by C.W.Ceram.
Published by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. no date.