Kaiser-panorama

The Kaiser-panorama, or Panorama of the Emperor, was a visual entertainment device of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, regarded as a forerunner of cinemas and virtual reality. It was conceived by the German physicist and entrepreneur August Fuhrmann around the 1880s.

It was a large, cylindrical wooden cabinet with some twenty-five seats arranged around it. Each seat had a binocular viewer showing pairs of stereoscopic photographs, taken from slightly different angles to create a sense of depth. A rotating mechanism moved glass slides illuminated from behind, and a bell signalled the change of image every few seconds. The collections showed exotic countries, scientific expeditions, natural disasters, distant cities and major historical events. Fuhrmann came to have a network of branches across central Europe and an archive of over one hundred thousand photographs. With the expansion of cinema it lost audiences until it almost disappeared; today few original examples remain in working order, mainly in Germany and Austria.

This exhibition presents a reproduction of this cabinet, made by the 3D Màgic Club and designed for stereoscopic viewing.