EPFL's Murten Terapixel Panorama in 360° splendor for the first time
The Terapixel Panorama of the Battle of Murten, Installation View at the Bernisches Historisches Museum © 2026 EPFL / eM+ Laboratory - CC-BY-SA 4.0
To mark the 550th anniversary of an event that altered European history, the largest digital image of a single object ever produced – a 1.6-trillion-pixel digital twin of the Murten Panorama – is now on show at the Bern History Museum. The historic physical painting has only been seen once, for six months, in the last 120-years. The digital twin is a restaging of the original, created and transformed through advanced computational processes.
Five-hundred and fifty years ago in 1476, around the village of Murten in western Switzerland, the Confederates and their allies won in their battle against the troops of the Burgundian duke, Charles the Bold.
The victory halted the rapid expansion of the Burgundian Empire, secured the independence of the Swiss Confederacy, and revolutionized military tactics by proving that disciplined infantry could destroy heavily armored cavalry.
From painting to pixels
A bit more than 400 years later, Louis Braun created the Murten panorama painting of the battle, a 100-meter-long and 10-meter-tall artwork. It was on display from 1894 – 1907 and then fell into oblivion, only being rediscovered in 1996 after which it was the subject of a six-year conservation effort.
After being shown at Switzerland’s 2002 national expo the mural remained rolled up in a Swiss Army Deposit until being delivered in 2022 to EPFL’s Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) for conservation, digitization, computational analysis and ultimately it’s interpretation in the museological domain.
The imaging of the mural, enabled by camera systems manufacturer, Phase One, took advantage of an iXH 150-megapixel camera mounted on a motorized rig developed specifically for the enormous scale and weight of the painting. The process took four months, capturing 27,000 images. While the rig was motorized the painting had to be hand rolled into position, to ensure its physical protection.
The challenges of producing an image of 1.6 terapixel with high color fidelity at a resolution of 1000 dots per inch were both physical and technical.
Physically, these included capturing a flawless 2D picture despite irregularities on the canvas’s surface. The hyperboloid nature of the original painting, unlike a cylindrical surface which can be laid flat, had both folding/crinkling. Technically, this problem had to be solved through creating custom utilities for the existing stitching software to ensure the perfect alignment of adjacent images.
Two intertwined research phases
The first phase addressed the problems of scholars (art and military historians in this case) of such vast visual datasets filled with image complexity. To address the cognitive overload, the research introduced a novel human-in-the-loop computational workbench.
By leveraging multimodal AI and Large Language Models, this system augments scholarly capabilities, enabling the large-scale identification of points of interest and the comparison of historical origins based on research into Medieval chronicles, letters, narrative literature, and other archival documents. These insights are preserved in a publicly available knowledge base, bridging the gap between intricate historical imagery and specialists and the public.
The second trajectory of research went to the heart of digital twin and future of immersive and interactive experiences in museums, The convergence of seamless real-time tiling, virtual productions, audification and olfactory research were bought together in this phase.
“After more than three years of scanning, post-processing and digital augmentation of the painting’s three rolls, we are excited that the 1.6-trillion-pixel twin of a previously inaccessible historic object is showing for the first time in its intended panoramic format” said Professor Sarah Kenderdine, head of eM+.
A 4D experience, including a ‘smell necklace’
Following interactive installations in Geneva, Zurich, Nyon, San Franscisco and Hong Kong, the Terapixel Panorama is on show at the Bern History Museum for the first time in a fully 360-degree interactive, high resolution-display system built by the Laboratory. This includes a real time, historically informed spatial audiovisual experience augmented with range of seminal 3D digital objects from Swiss museum collections (National Museum and Bern History Museum) and volumetric video of reenactment performers.
In addition, eM+ created software to release synthetic olfactory augmentations through a so called “smell necklace”. Odors such as horse manure, sweat and gunpower envelop the user in real time as they navigate the digital painting. The scents themselves were created in collaboration with the Swiss biotech company, dsm-firmenich.
“It’s a milestone to bring this historic panorama in the public realm with unprecedented fidelity and interpretation. It satisfies publics and scholars alike and breaks new ground in computational museology,” Kenderdine continued.
The research has also initiated a global effort led by the EPFL team and the International Panorama Council to list a series of major historic and contemporary panoramas as UNESCO Memory of the World. This application is in process.
The exhibition, The Battle of Murten. Staging a Victory, is open 25 February 2026 until 9 May 2027 at the Bern History Museum.
To find out more the Terapixel Panorama website offers additional, interactive and educational information. The scholars platform is available at https://scholar.terapixelpanorama.ch/.
Funded by: Swiss National Science Foundation, Loterie Romande (Fribourg), Loterie Romande (Conférence des Présidents des Organes de Répartition), Loterie Romande (Vaud), Municipality of Murten, Canton of Fribourg, Federal Office for Culture, Association of the Friends of the Panorama, Foundation Etrillard, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, UBS Culture Foundation, Association Suisse d’Histoire et de Sciences Militaires, Phase OneTM.
