Panoraama

Panoraama is a term used in several languages, notably Estonian, to denote a panoramic view or image—a wide, continuous representation of a scene. It refers to the same broad concept as the English word panorama and is used across photography, film, and art to describe formats that convey a wide spatial context beyond a standard photograph.

In photography and digital media, panoraama is typically created by capturing multiple overlapping images from a fixed position or while panning, and then stitching them together with specialized software. The resulting image can be a wide, multi-image panorama or a 360-degree panorama intended for immersive viewing in virtual reality, online tours, or geographic visualization. Common formats include cylindrical and spherical panoramas.

Historically, panoramas emerged in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries as large-scale painted or printed works designed to surround viewers inside a gallery, creating the illusion of being within a sweeping landscape. The term panorama originated from a combination of Greek roots meaning “all” and “view,” and it later entered various languages with slight phonetic variations, such as panoraama in Estonian usage.

Today, the term panoraama remains most commonly used in Estonian-language contexts, while English-language usage tends to prefer panorama. The concept, however, remains central to fields such as photography, virtual tours, mapping, and immersive entertainment, where wide-angle, seamless representations of space are valued for context, scale, and viewer engagement.