Panorama vs Stereograph
パノラマ館 / ステレオ写真
Panorama comes from Exhibition Design and Stereograph from Publishing and Editing. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Panorama
A giant painting covering the entire inner wall of a rotunda placed the audience at the center of the landscape. Lighting and real objects in the foreground erased the edge of the picture, and this 19th-century immersion machine became the summit of mass visual entertainment before cinema.
Stereograph
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Paired photographs taken with twin lenses and seen in depth through a viewer, the largest picture medium of the 19th century. Mass-produced cards let a family travel the world from the parlor, an immersion device long before VR.
| Panorama | Stereograph | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1787–1900s | 1850s–1930s |
| Family | Exhibition Design | Publishing and Editing |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | A 360-degree painting / The central viewing platform / Foregrounds that erase the boundary / Controlled natural light | Twin paired images / Curved card mounts / Descriptions on the back / Series collecting |
| Best used for | Standing an audience inside a landscape to experience one scene all around · Letting the scale of a historical event register through width of view | Records of ruins and architecture that need to keep their depth · Exhibition content shown together with the device that displays it |
| Type | No lettering inside, splitting text between an entrance intro and exit panel | Set title and description on the back and number the series |
| Composition | A central platform, the view cropped above and below by canopy and rail | Always include foreground, middle and distance to build depth steps |
| Material | Real objects joined to the cylindrical painting, light entering indirectly above | Hold the parallax constant and mount on card stiff enough to curve |
| Caution | Painting the full circle without resolving seams and eye height lets the viewer catch the picture somewhere, and the immersion breaks for good. | Two images are simply placed side by side without matching the parallax, so viewers never fuse them and come away with tired eyes instead of depth. |