Panrama in VR
I have made a VR viewer for Panrama stills, you can view the images in Virtual Reality on any HMD (Meta Quest, Pico, Apple Vision Pro). Just use the link below in the headset web browser to enable WebXR.
La Géode Omnimax could have been Panrama
For a really long time I have been interested in hemispherical cinema. I spent a lot of 2000s sunday afternoons in La Géode in Paris (thanks to my parents). It was mindblowing as 70mm hemispherical cinema can only be, VR cinema without headsets, and imo it is unmatched by 4k laser.
La Géode was super dynamic at the time, they ran a giant screen film festival each year since 1995, and they tried to evolve the place, with stereoscopy (Encounter In The 3rd Dimension, Dolby 3D on 6 sync Barco were great!, worse were the late lcd glasses on a weak 2k Barco), and live-rendered shows in the dome (Kheops).
It reopened in late 2025 after 6 years of renovation of the seats, removing of asbestos, scrapping the 70mm Omnimax projector with a new Imax laser 4K digital projector, and a new screen to improve the lower power laser projection.
Recently, I dive back into the history of hemispherical cinema and studied the Panrama of Philippe Jaulmes. He wrote multiple books on hemispherical screen cinema, called “Panrama” and “Cinema Total”.
The Panrama was demoed at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal. The IMAX format for large screen was demoed at the same Expo67 and it was finalized for the 1970 Expo in Osaka. Most of the Panrama’s 1967 ideas were implemented in the IMAX format as Omnimax and later Imax Dome, as the 70mm film was ideal for the large dome that need crazy brightness power as the screen is big and less than half-reflective to limit the light and sound reflection.
Multiple Panrama theaters were built:
- in Montreal, 1967, 8 meters wide
- in 1969 in Clapiers (Montpelier), 12 meters wide
- in Paris Montparnasse, Espace Gaîté, 17 meters wide, 250 seats, opened from 1978 until 1998 The Montreal was on vertical 35mm film, but the Clapiers Panrama was on VistaVision fx horizontal 35mm film.
La Geode could have been a Panrama cinema, but the Imax expertise was prefered, probably because of the standardized plans, the proven Imax 70mm with cameras available, and an incredible movie catalog with space-station rushes. There was a plan to add small Panrama screens in secondary rooms at La Geode, but it was never done.
Only three french movies have been produced for hemispherical Omnimax:
- Pierre Willemin’s “L’Eau et les hommes” in 1984, partially shot hemispherical
- Pierre Étaix’s “J’écris dans l’Espace” in 1989, fully shot hemispherical
- Gérard Caldéron’s “Origine Océan” in 2001, partially shot hemispherical
- La Géode produced “Moi, Van Gogh” in 2009 but it was Imax only, not hemispherical
Resources
Offical Panrama website : panrama.net
Gilbert Compareti Panrama films and photos
Conference at the Cinémathèque Française: L’Écran Total: histoire du Panrama et autres concepts immersifs, Hubert Corbin, John Felton, Frédéric Jaulmes, Simon Jaulmes and Laurent Manonni, 18 novembre 2016
Christophe Cordier photos of the Clapiers theater in 2011 (on Emmanuel Chaussade blog)
The web viewer is based on LifeCastVR open-sourced works, with the incredible ThreeJS WebGL WebXR library.
Btw, the same viewer is used for Presence in VR180, blog post.
