With few exceptions, businesses would be hard pressed to identify much of a silver lining in the economic cloud that has hovered over the nation since the attacks of Sept. 11. Almost every industry is grappling with an uncertain future due, in part, to the airline industry fallout and subsequent acts of terrorism of the biological kind, both against a backdrop of already-present economic uncertainty. But history has shown that war can help nurse a faltering economy back to good health, particularly in the case of businesses involved in the effort. If that’s to be the case this time around, a campaign against terrorism could present not just a silver lining, but a golden opportunity for Sun Valley-based Panoram Technologies. The company holds a patent on a new form of visualization and simulation technology it’s convinced can aid the federal government in its new war on terrorism. To fully understand the technological advancements Panoram has made, first take all you know about how you view the data that pops up on your computer monitor, and chuck it out the window. In the 1980s, Burbank-based Metavision, then run by Panoram President and CEO Theo Mayer, designed a triple-paneled, giant screen for Metavision’s entertainment and theme park clients. Using several overlapping projectors at once, data is viewed either as one seamless panoramic image, or in separate, interchangeable combinations all with integrated multi-media linkups. Mayer later set out to use the same “blended edge” technology, now patented as Video Panoram, to create an off-the-shelf, desktop version of the triple-screen for a PC monitor. After a few false starts he came up with the PowerView 290, which he calls an “information appliance,” that wraps around the user at a 140-degree angle at about 3.9 million pixels of resolution. The development allowed Mayer to leverage Panoram into his own company in 1997. Now, the PV290, along with Panoram’s suite of other visual display briefing and design demonstration centers, is in use in more than 85 countries, with the gas and oil industry as the biggest user. The PV 290 caught the attention of the military about two years ago at a simulation products trade show, and the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego began using it. “That’s when the light bulb went on, really,” said Mayer. “That’s when we knew that this was technology that was finally going to be taken seriously by not just entertainment and big industry, but that it had broad applications for military procedures.” Since its introduction, the price tag on the PV290 has gone from $27,000 to $22,750 a significant drop, considering the high manufacturing costs have kept competitors at arm’s length, according to Mayer. Revenues for the last fiscal year were just over $10 million. Panoram has also designed a rugged, portable version of the desktop unit that sells for $45,000 and can be carried right on to the battlefield and set up by two people in less than 10 minutes. It has the capacity for supporting multitudes of real-time, multi-media platforms in tandem with raw and changeable data that makes it possible to reduce the time it takes to turn intelligence into briefings by about 30 percent, according to Mayer. According to Gary Michael Kann, president of Kann Capital LTD in Century City and a Panoram investor, Mayer’s timing couldn’t be more on target. “The government loves this stuff,” said Kann. He said the U.S. military’s collective budget for domestic use alone of flight and combat simulation products, now at about $1.3 billion, is expected to increase by as much as 11 percent over the next three years. “We don’t know yet, quite frankly, where that’s all going to shake out, but clearly much of that spending is going to go to Panoram,” said Kann. “And that doesn’t include foreign markets, where Panoram has already built up relationships in other industries.” So, over the next few weeks, Mayer will be in Washington to convince governmental agencies that visualization and simulation technologies now being employed by the U.S. military are ready for an upgrade. And, because Panoram is the only manufacturer of the blended-edge, three-screen desktop product, the company appears to have carved out a potentially lucrative niche for itself in a market Mayer is convinced is about to crack wide open. He is hoping for sales of more than $100 million within five years. The bigger challenge for Mayer may be in explaining exactly how the stuff works. But, said Kann, that’s easy. “That’s the secret to their success: specifically taking technology and successfully marketing it,” he said. Mayer said it’s all going to boil down to the slide show. “At the end of the Cold War, we sort of began a slow swim up stream from entertainment to defense,” said Mayer. “But it’s come to fruition in a very short period of time. We first started addressing the military marketplace in June of 2000. Since then, we’ve been shocking people. The game now is we need to expose more government officials to the fact that this technology exists and they need it now.”