The Waller Gunnery Trainer was based on Vitarama, a multi-camera widescreen technology invented by Fred Waller and Ralph Walker in the 1930s (Waller 1942). Vitarama was originally intended for the 1939 World's Fair but proved too complicated. Further development ended with the onset of World War II. However, test footage was seen by a friend of Waller's, H. Martyn Baker, who had graduated from the Naval Academy. Baker immediately saw its potential for training gunners and travelled to Washington D.C., where he found great interest from the military. Waller and his team went on to construct the prototype described in the report below and eventually built 75 trainers for the US Army Air Corps, the US Navy and the British Admiralty (Kimble 2002). It trained approximately 1,000,000 men and was credited with saving 350,000 lives during World War II (Strohmaier 2024).

The original Vitarama concept was inspired by Waller's awareness that binocular vision was effective only out to about 20 feet (Waller 1945). Beyond that, peripheral vision and other cues were more important to the sensation of depth. But a flat cinema screen wide enough to accommodate peripheral vision would have been impractical. Instead, similarly to Vitarama, the gunnery trainer used a section of a sphere 20 feet in radius to give a field of view of 150 deg. horizontally and 75 deg. vertically. The trainer tracked the direction of the gun to maintain a record of hits and provide audible feedback to the gunner.

Waller was a prolific inventor from a young age. After working for his father, an early commercial photographer in New York, Waller went on to producing titles for silent movies (LaMonica 2023) and in the 1930s became the head of Paramount Studio's special effects department. He received many patents related to the projection of images and motion pictures. Although Vitarama was never implemented, after the war Waller went on to develop and patent the widescreen process Cinerama.