At 10mx100m, the Murten Panorama was too big to install. Now, the world can explore its digital twin.

https://terapixelpanorama.ch/

WHO

The Terapixel Panorama project is led by the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) at EPFL, in Switzerland, in collaboration with historians, technologists, and cultural institutions. The project centres on Louis Braun’s 1893 panoramic painting of the 1476 Battle of Murten—an enormous 10×100 metre artwork that has been inaccessible to the public for over a century.

NEED

This unique cultural artifact was at risk of fading into obscurity, stored away in a military depot after only a few public exhibitions. Scholars lacked digital access to the painting’s fine detail, and the general public had no way to experience its historical and artistic richness. There was a need to preserve the artwork and make it accessible for research, education, and public engagement.

SOLUTION

The eM+ team conducted an unprecedented digitisation of the painting using a Phase One iXH 150MP camera, capturing over 27,000 images and assembling them into a 1.62 terapixel digital twin—the largest image ever created of a single object.

Boojum created a website so that the panorama can be viewed at any time as well as outside of Switzerland.

Technical aspects of this project included:

• No external libraries. Everything was written from scratch in vanilla Javascript and Django.

• Panorama web explorer using an image tiling pyramid that supports:
          - Clickable points of interest
          - Controlled cache invalidation for smooth transitions between layers
          - Automatic selection of closest image server
          - Anti scraping using nginx secure links
          - Preloading relevant portions of the panorama
          - Mobile gestures for pan and zoom.

• Story player that supports:
          - Front-end camera keyframe editor
          - Audio in multiple languages
          - SRT subtitles
          - Time-triggered inline video and 3D assets in webgl.

• Audio:
          - One-shot foley samples with audio panning synced to camera
          - Ambient sound channels for different areas of the panorama mixed by sampling a colored image map.

• CMS:
          - To support text-content in multiple languages, we used a flat data structure that enabled an immediate and predictable authoring experience
          - Audio and video files use Django file fields served by nginx
          - Django views are cached using Django's built in cache, so the entire site becomes static once the cache is hydrated.