These are some “stills” from my first experiment in creating a hand-drawn 360-degree panorama. Click through to see it in action.
I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing something like this for a while, so was happy to discover that Photoshop has pretty good support for this. Also helpful were tutorials here and here. The drawing was all done digitally, although some people manage to use real media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Cyclorama
Right. But the trick is drawing a 2d image that maps to a sphere (vs a cylinder, in the case of the Gettysburg painting). The handy thing Photoshop does is make it easy to switch between an equirectangular projection, and a spherical projection in which you can pan and tilt the camera.
(But of course the Gettysburg painting is great… I still remember seeing it first-hand as a wee lad)