Page 18 - Cinerama_booklet

THE STORY OF

synchronized projectors these films blended into a mosaic that
covered a range 185° wide and 85° high, but the picture was
distorted on the conventional Aat screen and the range was so
wide that Waller found the cameras were photographing each

other, creating fuzzy blobs on the fringes of the scene.
About this time Ralph Walker, one of New York's most famous
architects, asked Waller's help in devising a motion picture exhibit

for a project he was designing for the New York World's Fair.
The building was the Perisphere and the instant Waller saw the
concave spherical surface of the interior he realized that this was

the answer to his problem : a curved screen, that would reproduce
the curved field of vision of the human retina. With this obstacle
n work on perfecting Cinerama. He had

from Walker and, later, Laurance Rocke-
old Rockefeller carriage house in
ventor as a laboratory. Then came
g an end to the whole project.

inerama itself went to war. A
itnessed one of the early demon-

wondered aloud if such a device
training. Waller thought it could,
developed the Waller Gunnery
ly credited by the Air Force with

ves that would otherwise have been
e and the Pacific. Using a five-lensed
arate projectors, instead of eleven, the

elaborate mechanism projected synchronized motion pictures of
"enemy" planes on the inner surface of a dome in front of which
was mounted a series of electronically controlled machine guns.
The student gunner learned to lead his target in a setting that

duplicated not only the visual but the emotional environment of