About Me

Panoramia is a self-portrait studio. I created Panoramia by taking an everyday technology (iPhone’s camera feature) and wondering about how it could be used differently. Panoramia uses a camera’s panorama feature, but instead of stitching scenery together, it stitches together different views of a person’s face. It began as an experiment on a high speed train, that I took from Zurich to Paris in the summer of 2013. I wanted to see how the iPhone camera would stitch the landscape as it zoomed by. After all, all you need for the panorama feature to work is relative motion.

[“Tracks”: picture taken in Zurich, 2013]

I took such pictures whenever I would travel, whenever I found relative motion between myself and the surroundings. I loved the oil paint-like effects in some pictures, in others just how unusual the photos turned out to be!

[“Surreal”: picture taken in Haridwar, 2013]

I developed a fascination with the effects of the panorama feature. When I got back from Europe, I discussed these ideas with my “art” mentor Martin Demaine and continued exploring a variety of subjects, including moving water.

[“Water Lilies”: taken in Chicago, 2013]

I had a lot of fun playing a prank on my friends using a warped image of electric towers! I realized during photography a play in Paris that I can stitch faces! Imagine all the possibilities of photographs that capture the motion of artists during live performances!

[“The Protagonist”:  taken in Paris, 2013]

Finally I thought of creating a portrait studio for the MIT Museum! I started building an old-school mock-up of an apparatus that I’d envisioned, at the MIT Museum Studio (a wonderful space for budding artists and technologists to test out their ideas).

[“The Old School Mock-Up”: taken at MIT Museum Studio featuring Martin and Seth, 2015]

I slowly adapted the idea to make it more robust for the museum environment: replaced the iPhone with an iPad (large screen), replaced the moving arm with a App that does the sweep in the software. It’s amazing what all can go wrong in a museum environment: ranging from privacy issues (in a project involving cameras) to the simple fact that you cannot have a visible charging point (otherwise people can remove the charge and use it to charge their own phones)!

After months of back and forth, Panoramia finally developed into a student project that got accepted to be displayed at the MIT Museum! The photograph displayed is “New York Sky Line” that I shot in 2014 (using my iPhone 5s at that time) while taking a ferry to Statue of Liberty!

Here‘s a flickr gallery with some of our Panoramia experiments. Do stop by the MIT Museum to try out some experiments of your own! Send me your picture to upload on my flickr stream if you like!