The Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer used five interlocked 35mm projectors to create an immersive training experience, and had its origins in Fred Waller’s Vitarama process. Vitarama was an attempt by the inventor to show motion pictures as a mosaic inside a concave screen to completely fill the viewer’s field of vision, creating a fully immersive visual experience. A modern-day equivalent would be an Omnimax-type screen.

The inventor Fred Waller started the process as a proposal for the presentation of a vision of the future of motion pictures, to be used at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in the Perisphere. It consisted of eleven interlocked 16mm Cine Kodak Special cameras for photography – and required eleven 16mm projectors to exhibit the process. Waller was a prolific inventor with hundreds of patents to his name, including a novel type of water skis called “Dolphin Akwa Skis”. He was also a motion-picture cameraman with considerable experience in silent film special effects, as well as a producer/director of many sound shorts for Paramount’s East Coast studio in Astoria, NY.

Eventually the World’s Fair idea was abandoned due to many complications and replaced with a multi-image slide show projected on the Perisphere dome called “The World of Tomorrow”.

However, demo test footage for Waller’s Vitarama happened to be seen in 1940 by several senior naval officers who were specialists in ballistics. They realized the Vitarama process had potential as a “virtual reality” (before the term was ever coined!) gunnery trainer, as America prepared to enter the Second World War.

At this time, gunnery training was a fairly crude affair that only taught servicemen the bare basics of artillery targeting. Some of the techniques were as rudimentary as trainees firing at a large flag being towed behind a plane – first from a static position on the ground, then graduating to firing from another plane in flight. Each gunner had their bullets dipped in a different colored dye, so each hit could be accounted for.

Unfortunately, this training process used up a massive amount of fuel, hardware, ammunition and war planes that could have been diverted to fight the enemy. A different way had to be found … and quickly.

Waller leapt to the Navy’s challenge. By his own account:

“...Within sixty hours I had the whole thing worked out. The answer came to me while shaving. The clue to the problem was to do it all backwards, to start at the point where the projectile struck the aircraft.”

The purpose of the new machine was to train gunners more efficiently under realistic battle conditions; to estimate quickly and accurately the range of a target; to track it and to estimate the correct point of aim when using non-computing sights. Waller and his team spent several months developing the apparatus, overcoming many complex problems.

His designs for the apparatus impressed the Army Air Corps and Navy officials enough to give him the use of four bombers and three pursuit planes for the making of a test film with his eleven-camera Vitarama prototype. By August 1940, Waller had a crude prototype trainer built, including a dummy gun and scoring mechanism. Officers of the Army Air Corps, the Navy and the Marines viewed the new test model in Waller’s West 55th Street labs in New York City and were impressed. Early in 1941, Waller received an order from the Navy for 31 trainers – with mass production to start immediately (without even seeing a full-scale prototype). Eventually a total of 75 trainers were built, several of these were taken to England. The cost to build each trainer was US$41,500 in 1941 (over US$860,000 in 2024).

Considering the plethora of moving parts, the record of reliability established by the trainer was remarkable and, perhaps, remains unparalleled in the history of analog motion-picture projection. Operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week – training more than one million servicemen in the US, Hawaii and England – not a single mechanism failed in-service and not one Waller Trainer had to be returned to the factory for overhaul.

Waller later recalled that he received over a thousand inquiries from servicemen to the effect of: “When are we going to see regular pictures like this!?” Waller’s account suggests that a strong commercial appetite for the rich cinematic experience, realized in later years with Cinerama, clearly already existed in the 1940s. Wartime experiences on the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer may well have helped to establish and reinforce this desire.