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A panorama is a wide, all-encompassing view; hence also a panoramic format. The word comes from Greek pan ("all") horama ("view") and was coined by the Scottish painter Robert Barker in 1792 to describe his paintings of Edinburgh shown on a cylindrical surface, which he soon was exhibiting in London. From 1793 Barker moved his panoramas to the first purpose-built panorama building in the world, in Leicester Square and made a fortune. Viewers flocked to pay a stiff 3 shillings to stand on a central platform under a skylight, which offered an even lighting, and get an experience that was "panoramic" (an adjective that didn't appear in print until 1813). The extended meaning of a "comprehensive survey" of a subject followed sooner, in 1801. Visitors to Barker's semi-circular Panorama of London, painted as if viewed from the roof of Albion Mills on the South Bank, could purchase a series of six prints that modestly recalled the experience; end-to-end the prints stretched 3.25 meters. (see link)

Barker's accomplishment involved sophisticated manipulations of perspective not encountered in the panorama's predecessors, the wide-angle "prospect" of a city familiar since the 16th century, or Wenceslas Hollar 's "long view" of London, etched on several contiguous sheets. When Barker first patented his technique in 1787 he had gaven it a French title: La Nature à Coup d’ Oeil ("Nature at a glance"). A sensibility to the " picturesque " was developing among the educated class, and as they toured picturesque districts, like the Lake District, they might have in the carriage with them a large lens set in a picture frame, a "landscape glass" that would contract a wide view into a "picture" when held at arm's length.

Barker's Panorama was hugely successful and spawned a series of "immersive" panoramas: the Museum of London's curators found mention of 126 panoramas that were exhibited between 1793 and 1863. In the US, the experience was intensified by unrolling a canvas-backed scroll past the viewer in a cyclorama (noted in the 1840s), an inflation of an idea that was familiar in the hand-held landscape scroll s of Song China Panoramas were only eclipsed by the moving pictures. (See motion picture.) The similar diorama, essentially an elaborate scene in an artificially-lit room-sized box, shown in Paris and taken to London in 1823, is credited to the inventive Louis Daguerre, who had trained with a painter of panoramas. Few of these unwieldy ephemera survive; a rare surviving painted panorama is the Mesdag Panorama, a museum in The Hague. An exhibition "Panoramania" was held at the Barbican in the 1980s.

"Panorama" inspired many jocular "-rama" coinages, such as the wide-screen Cinerama process that brought the viwer's peripheral visionPeripheral vision is that part of vision that occurs at the edges of the field of view. Peripheral vision is weak in humans, especially at distinguishing color and shape. This is because the density of receptor cells on the retina is greatest at the cente into the experience, which is extended in the modern IMAXIMAX (for Image Maximum) is a film projection system which has the capacity to display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film display systems. A standard IMAX screen is 22 m wide and 16 m high, but can be larger. IMAX is the most film-projection technology. Most recently the cartoon series FuturamaFor the animated cartoon series, see Futurama (TV series). Futurama was an exhibit/ride at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes that showed the world 30 years into the future, including automated highways and vast suburbs. The e spoofs such overblown retro-futuristic technovisionary imaginings.

The immersive esthetic experience of Barker's Panorama infuses state-of-the art simulations at DisneylandDisneyland is a theme park at Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. It is the world's most famous themed amusement park and one of the most visited sites in the world. The park's official name is "Disneyland," but to avoid confusion with the new overa or Universal StudiosUniversal Studios is a famous " Hollywood" movie studio located at 100 Universal City Plaza Drive in Universal City, California, which is in the San Fernando Valley. History Universal Studios. Elsa Lanchester from Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Claude Rain, on their way to achieving the ultimate immersion art: the holodeckIn the Star Trek fictional universe, the holodeck is a form of virtual reality. Enterprise D The holodeck is an enclosed room in which objects and people are simulated by a combination of replicated matter animated with weak tractor beams as well as shape of Star TrekStar Trek collectively refers to six science fiction television series, ten motion pictures, and hundreds of novels, video games, and other works of fiction all set within the same fictional universe created by Gene Roddenberry in the early to mid 1960s.. But nowadays panorama once more connotes the landscape vision itself, unmediated by art or technology.