Spatial Transfiguration: Anamorphic Mixed-Reality in the Virtual Reality Panorama

Abstract

Spatial illusion and immersion was achieved in Renaissance painting through the manipulation of linear perspective’s pictorial conventions and painterly technique. The perceptual success of a painted trompe l’œil, its ability to fool the observer into believing they were viewing a real three-dimensional scene, was constrained by the limited immersive capacity of the two-dimensional painted canvas. During the baroque period however, artists began to experiment with the amalgamation of the ‘real’ space occupied by the observer together with the pictorial space enveloped by the painting’s picture plane: real and pictorial space combined into one pictorial composition resulting in a hybridised ‘mixed-reality’. Today, the way architects, and designers generally, use the QuickTime Virtual Reality panorama to represent spaces of increasing visual density have much to learn from the way in which Renaissance and baroque artists manipulated the three-dimensional characteristics of the picture plane in order to offer more convincing spatial illusions. This paper outlines the conceptual development of the QuickTime VR panorama by Ken Turkowski and the Apple Advanced Technology Group during the late 1980s. Further, it charts the technical methods of the Virtual Reality panorama’s creation in order to reflect upon the VR panorama’s geometric construction and range and effectiveness of spatial illusion. Finally, through a brief analysis of Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors [1533] and Andrea Pozzo’s nave painting in Sant ‘Ignazio [1691-94] this paper proposes an alternative conceptual model for the pictorial construction of the VR panorama that is innovatively based upon an anamorphic ‘mixed-reality’