Page 201 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 201/206
Hugo d’Alesi: Maréorama at the1900 Paris Exposition.
This was a very-large scale simulation of a voyage from Marseilles to Istanbul by passenger ship. On each side of a near-life-size model ship, which was the vehicle for the spectators/participators in this simulation, a giant scroll, painted with scenes representing the views passengers would see en passage,would unfurl as the ship was rolled and rocked by giant hydraulic rams. Stephan Oettermann, in his keynote book The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, describes the Maréorama: “One of the screens moves on the port side, the other on starboard. Both are coiled upon cylindrical reels situated near the ends of the building, where they are concealed from the view of the ship’s passengers by sails and ornaments....These extremely heavy cylinders are supported by floats in a water-basin. To simulate the roll and pitch of a ship, and to impart these movements to the boat-deck carrying the spectators, it is supported by a system of Cardanic rings, similar to that used for accommodating ship’s compasses. This involved the use of floats in water, hydraulic piston engines, and pumps driven by electric motors.” You can get some idea of the complexity of this simulation from the schematic visualisations above - the canvases (all 215,000 sq ft/ 20,000 m of them) took 8 months to paint, by a team working under the commercial artist-originator d’Alesi. Apart from complaints of sea-sickness, I can’t find any first-hand reports of the success of the simulation, but this must have been an expensive joy-ride - and obviously suffered from the same disturbing disorientations as early VR experiments in the 1990s.
Simulations of this kind - the only kind possible in these very early days of cinematography - were spectacular. The scope and ambition of the idea - to simulate the voyage of a passenger steamer across the Mediterranean and beyond, and to do this with giant scrolling painted back-drops, mechanically un-wound each side of the 'ship' - liike Daguerre's static rotunda-mounted Dioramas and Panoramas - is amazing enough, but to actually engineer, design and build this giant hydraulically- mounted pseudo-ship - to make it simulate wave-action, rolling and pitching - just spectacular! In the late 1950s, the engineer-cinematographer-inventor Morton Heilig brought this idea up to date with his Sensorama multimedia motorbike simulator (Heilig: Sensorama 1958), and in the 1980s Jeffrey Shaw used a bicycle simulator to interface with his Legible City (1989) as he introduced a kind of 'augmented reality' into his installations. Thus the exciting world of pre-VR simulation.