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Victorian Virtual Reality: Mesdag’s Panorama

These days Virtual Reality is all the rage, based on the tremendous advances in computers and displays. But I recently found out that our ancestors in the 19th century had their own fling with immersive VR, and it was very successful -- and a lot of fun!

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    I discovered this in the Netherlands. I was at the Hague, and was told I should visit the Panorama painted by Hendrik Willem Mesdag. I had no idea what it was, but Google informed me that it is a cylindrical painting more than 14 meters high and about 120 meters long, which creates the illusion that the viewer is on a sand dune overlooking the beach and village of Scheveningen in the year 1881. When I read that, I figured it may be worth seeing -- but as for creating an illusion, hey, it’s a flat painting hanging on a wall, so how real can it seem?
    So -- I lowered my expectations and went with some friends to the circular building that houses the huge painting. There we entered a dark tunnel that took us to a spiral stairway, which emerged inside a large wooden gazebo with a wide-brimmed roof...
    ... which stood on a sand dune overlooking the beach and village of Scheveningen in the year 1881. Not overlooking a flat painting of them, mind you; overlooking the actual place, with cloudy skies above and the sea and land receding to the distant horizon. It was a perfect illusion.
    Here are some photos of what we saw from that gazebo:

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Click photo to enlarge

To understand why the experience was so real, you need to see the ingenious construction of that place, which follows the invention of the Irish painter Robert Barker, patented by him in 1787.
Here is the setup:

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What you see in the photo is the hall, 40 meters across, with its ceiling admitting the daylight, and the 360 degree painting hanging on its wall. On its floor is a fake sand dune with some weeds and flotsam on it, and on top of the dune is the gazebo. The viewers enter the gazebo through its floor, so they never see the big ceiling above its roof; and their lines of sight to the top and bottom edges of the painting are blocked by the gazebo roof and by the sand dune respectively. They have no cue -- and no clue -- of the enclosing structures that are rooted in the present day’s real world; their entire experience is of being in a gazebo on a dune with a limitless, edge-less landscape stretching in all directions.
Here is a video I shot by standing at the railing and turning around full circle. Watch it full screen to get a hint of the immersive experience involved!

And here is the full panorama, all 120 meters of it. Of course at this reduced scale you can't even see the many painted people and animals going about their lives on the shore and among the buildings of the village.

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Every detail in this experience is carefully designed to add to the illusion. The entry through a dark tunnel ending with a spiral staircase disorients the visitors, disconnecting them from the outside world before suddenly depositing them into the unexpected light of the virtual scene. The daylight-derived lighting of the interior is carefully managed as well. We remained for a long time, immersed in the reality captured for us by Hendrik Mesdag, finding ever more intricate details of the world of those fishermen in 1881.
And after this captivating experience I learned that panoramas like this (also called cycloramas) were very popular in the 19th century; dozens of round theaters were built on the five inhabited continents, and the huge canvases were exchanged between them once their size had been standardized. Our ancestors went there like we go to an IMAX today. Only the arrival of the cinema put an end to this form of entertainment. Today there are still twenty panoramas preserved and open to the public, and I certainly recommend you visit them -- I hope to see some more of them myself!

Victorian Virtual Reality: Mesdag’s Panorama