360cameras

The conversion of half of my garage into a workshop is going well!

...with this awesome free and open-source 360 viewer: Pannellum!

I was looking at Matterport, which is kind of the gold standard website to create and host 360° tours of properties in the realty business. What really interests me in Matterport is the ability to link 360 views, so you can click in photo spheres and be transported to another. This and the 360 viewer itself really makes tours interactive.

The problem with Matterport, it's a tool for professionals and it's really not very affordable for us hobbyists - unless you just want to create one tour and one tour only.

So I looked around for other solutions, and I stumbled on Pannellum: it's a viewer that you can easily integrate in your own web pages, and it offers in-sphere annotation and clickable links, just like Matterport.

And it turns out, if you have a Github account, you don't even need a web server: Github supports CORS - which Pannellum needs to fetch the image it's supposed to display, and if you enable Github Pages, you can host the 360 images, Pannellum itself and the HTML files necessary to use it to display the images you want to serve up in your repo.

So I created a repo to host my own 360 photos, and revisited this image - which is a statically-photoshopped image I sent my lumberjack to show him which trees to fell and clean up - to turn it into a Matterport-like dynamic "tour".

And this is what you see in the link in this post: it's the same 360 image you can look around in, but with interest points you can hover onto to get information, and one clickable point that takes you up one of the trees with a different 360 view. Once you're up there, you can click on the ground to go back down.

It's not much at the moment, but the possibilities are endless! You do have to know your way around HTML a bit (although if you clone my repo, you'll find a script I whipped up to create the HTML file and the thumbnail for the opengraph image automatically in Linux), but you have complete control of your content and it's totally free!

You can score over $200 off the DJI Osmo 360.

Using the 360° camera to take an overhead shot of the backyard. The camera was simply mounted on a long pole.

The days are getting longer and the opportunities to see nice auroras more scarce. Tonight's show was pretty good despite the full moon.

Sorry about the smears: I had my camera with me but no tripod, so I tried to hold it and keep very still, and that rarely produces sharp shots with a 10-second exposure time.

Many 360 viewers rely on the metadata to render a file correctly - both to determine whether the media is flat or spherical, and which projection to use. Unfortunately, the metadata is often not generated correctly or stripped by software and websites. Here's how to use ExifTool to restore the minimal necessary information to inform viewers that a photo or video is a sphere.

• Images

Most viewers expect at least the Exif Spherical or UsePanoramaViewer properties, as well as the ProjectionType property to be set.

This image for example was stitched by Microsoft ICE. We can see that by dumping the Exif data:

exiftool Baarn_-_Landgoed_Groeneveld_-_360°_Panorama_1.jpg  
...  
Software                        : Microsoft ICE v2.0.3.0  
Modify Date                     : 2021:04:26 17:11:38  
Panoramic Stitch Version        : 1  
Panoramic Stitch Camera Motion  : 3D Rotation  
Panoramic Stitch Map Type       : Horizontal Cylindrical  
Panoramic Stitch Theta 0        : 0  
Panoramic Stitch Theta 1        : 6.28318548202515  
Panoramic Stitch Phi 0          : 0.864624977111816  
Panoramic Stitch Phi 1          : 2.1347508430481  
Date/Time Original              : 2021:04:26 17:11:38  
...  

It does not contain the necessary properties and therefore is viewed incorrectly by most viewers as a flat image. To restore the minimal set of missing properties in this one, do:

exiftool -overwrite_original -Spherical=true -UsePanoramaViewer=true -ProjectionType=cylindrical <file>  

Note that if you use any kind of Google viewer, it only supports the equirectangular projection. So you might want to set ProjectionType to equirectangular instead: although it's incorrect, the viewer should at least open it as a 360 image, and if you're lucky, the viewer will detect that the aspect ratio is not 2:1 and view it as cylindrical anyway. SphereView does that with this file for instance.

• Videos

Most players expect XMP properties GSpherical:Spherical or GSpherical:Stitched, as well as the GSpherical:ProjectionType to be set. In addition, Google players also expect GPano:UsePanoramaViewer and GPano:ProjectionType to be set.

in this video for example, which was generated by Kdenlive, the video editor stripped the XMP properties from the source videos. If you download it and you play it with any player, by default it will be rendered as a rectilinear video.

To add the minimal set of missing XMP properties back to the file, do:

exiftool -overwrite_original -XMP-GPano:UsePanoramaViewer=true -XMP-GPano:ProjectionType=equirectangular -XMP-GSpherical:Spherical=true -XMP-GSpherical:Stitched=true -XMP-GSpherical:ProjectionType=equirectangular <file>  

I hope this helps!

Video I made this winter, to show a friend how to cross-country ski in the skate style.

This is a repost of the video I posted last week, which was hosted as a raw equirectangular video on PeerTube and therefore unwatchable without downloading it first and viewing it in a 360-capable player like VLC.

This one is hosted on Mirame360, which has a proper interactive 360 player.

The weather was finally warm enough today - and the roads dry enough - to go cycle and have a nice time. The ice break-up at our local rapids was mostly over, so the area was safe enough to be open to the public, and there was still some ice blocks around to watch. Many people were out and enjoying the early spring.

Incidentally, I'm sharing this video on a new 360° media sharing platform. This platform seems very new, and I'm unsure what the site's business model is exactly, as it seems totally free, doesn't offer paid tiers, doesn't appear to have advertising or invade my privacy. So it remains to be seen what the catch is, and whether it will stick around for very long. But so far, I'm really liking it: it works really well!

I've been asked what I use photospheres for. Here's one use case: marking trees to fell for the lumberjack.

I need trees felled at the back of our house. They're too thin, or dead, and I don't want them to fall on the roof at the next storm.

The lumberjack has a rather busy schedule, and normally he asks me to mark the trees, then he comes around when he has some free time to check the job and what he needs to bring exactly. Then he comes back with his tools and fells the trees. Typically, we're not home when he comes.

With the 360 camera, I can simply send him an annotated photo, he looks around in the comfort of his living room, and that's usually enough for him to size the job. So he only needs to come once to do the job and I get a discount.

Of course, I could also send him a bunch of flat photos and he could probably figure out where the trees are and what he needs to protect around them when he takes them down - particularly since he's been here before. But there's nothing like "being" in the picture to get a sense of what needs doing.

Here's a blast from the past: this is the second panorama I ever stitched. I shot the photos with a Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 in glorious 640x480 from the house of relatives of mine in Palos Verdes Estates, CA in 1997 or 1998.

I originally stitched the photos with whatever stitcher I was using back then, that wasn't very powerful in my recollection, and the result never came out quite right because it didn't handle HDR correctly. So I forgot about it.

But I kept the floppy with the original photos, and it still reads 🙂 So I loaded the photos in Hugin, figured out roughly what focal length I was using when I shot them, and out came the panorama, almost perfect! It's not even that grainy considering the low resolution.

LA was quite smoggy back then. I remember shooting this panorama because it was one of the clearest days we had seen in a while.

My relatives are long gone, and so is their house. They bought it in the 50's when the area was not yet fully developed and still affordable. Not so much anymore...

Old photos are always fun to look at, and old panoramas 360 times more so 🙂

I mostly do photography with my Ricoh Theta X 360° cameras. The photos I prefer are those in which I'm not in the shot, and the tripod isn't visible in the image's nadir. Here are my favorite tripods to minimize touching up the nadir to get the perfect shot.

All 360 cameras have a blind band at the seam between the front and rear images. But the stitching software that combines both images is clever enough to hide that blind band, provided whatever you photograph isn't so close that it's hopelessly invisible in the blind band.

This is why you can't see the camera's body in the photo, and this is also why you can't see the selfie stick if you use one to hold your camera, because it's narrower than the camera's body, and therefore entirely hidden in the blind band.

Unfortunately, if you use a tripod, the legs of the tripod become visible in the nadir of the image, and they need to be airbrushed out if you want the sphere to be "perfect": I find any artifacts left by whatever I used to take the shot - including myself - incredibly intrusive and distracting in what I'm trying to capture.

The smaller the tripod, the higher it is, the less tripod legs need to be airbrushed.

• The first tripod I like to use is the Benro BK15: it's really a selfie stick that turns into a mini-tripod. When I have nothing else, I keep that little guy in my backpack.

It's 20 cm in length when it's folded, and 81 cm fully deployed. Even better: it comes with a small Bluetooth button to trigger the camera remotely. Really handy to go hide somewhere and take the shot remotely, so I don't have to airbrush myself out of the shot later.

This is what it looks like with the camera on top:

And this is what the nadir looks like:

The legs aren't too intrusive, so it's not too difficult to remove them. If the ground is very flat and there's no wind, like inside a room, it's possible to keep the legs halfway closed to reduce their footprint in the image even more. But of course, the whole installation tends to become somewhat precarious.

• My second favorite tripod isn't a tripod at all: it's a modified monopod. The monopod in question is a Dörr Cybrit Medi 16: I picked it up years ago in an airport in Europe, but I suspect this model isn't made anymore. Any monopod would work equally well I guess.

Normally, monopods are supposed to be used with the camera screwed onto the fat end, and the thin end resting on the ground. I modified mine by screwing a 135mm aluminum base onto the fat end, installing a camera quick release on the thin end, and using it in reverse:

This monopod brings the camera to eye level, so it's great for POV shots. The small base makes it surprisingly stable, even outside on a windy day provided the ground is level.

The base is very small in the nadir, because the camera is high and quite far from it, and it's very easy to remove:

The folded monopod and its custom base are heavier and bulkier than the little Benro mini-tripod. While it fits just fine in my backpack, I only take it with me when I'm specifically going out to take photos.

• Finally, because the modified monopod's base is thick and threaded all the way through, I can also screw it on top of a regular tripod on the other side. The monopod then becomes an extension of the regular tripod.

I have to be careful not to break the head of the regular tripod with this arrangement. But with a bit of care, I can place the camera well over 3 meters high:

This is great for unusual points of view without a drone, and to photograph something higher up, like the beams above the ceiling in your house if you need to inspect the insulation for example.

But I only take the second tripod with me in my backpack if I absolutely have to, because it, the monopod and its base aren't light.

The regular tripod's legs are of course visible in the nadir, but they're far enough down that they stay rather thin and easy to airbrush:

This is a small guide to setup your Linux desktop to view 360 degree interactive photos - also called photospheres - and panoramas in Linux.

Regular image viewers generally don't support 360 images. There are very few native Linux viewers out that that supports them. The best I know of are:

• SphereView
• Lux

SphereView is available as a Flatpak for amd64 and arm64 platforms (I use both myself), while the author of Lux provides packages and AppImages but only for amd64.

What's more, I prefer the way SphereView uses the mouse to pan and tilt. So I recommend SphereView.

To install it, open a terminal and simply install the Flatpak from Flathub:

flatpak install io.github.dynobo.sphereview

And that's pretty much it for the basic installation: when you want to view a 360 image, right-click on it, select Open with, then select the SphereView application (your mileage may vary depending on the particular file manager you use, but this seems fairly universal).

But what if you want to automatically open a 360 image in SphereView and a flat image in your regular image viewer?

Unfortunately, SphereView doesn't render flat images correctly, so you can't use it as your default image viewer. But it's possible to write a small "shim" script that replaces the default image viewer, that inspects the image(s) the viewer is supposed to open, determines those that are flat and those that are spherical, then opens the flat images in the regular viewer and the spherical images in SphereView.

To do this:

• Install zenity and exiftool. On a Debian-based system for example, do:

sudo apt install zenity exiftool  

• Create a text file called auto_open_image_as_normal_or_photosphere.sh in your path with the following content:

#!/bin/bash  

FLATIMG_VIEWER="gtk-launch org.gnome.gThumb.desktop"  
PHOTOSPHERE_VIEWER="gtk-launch io.github.dynobo.sphereview.desktop"  

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then  
  IFS='|' read -ra ARGS <<< $(zenity --title "Choose one or more JPEG images to view" --multiple --file-selection --file-filter="*.jpg *.jpeg *.JPG *.JPEG")  
else  
  ARGS=("$@")  
fi  

FLATIMGS=()  
PHOTOSPHERES=()  

for FILE in "${ARGS[@]}"; do  
  if exiftool -X -xmp:ProjectionType "${FILE}" | grep -i ProjectionType > /dev/null 2> /dev/null; then  
    PHOTOSPHERES+=("${FILE}")  
  else  
    FLATIMGS+=("${FILE}")  
  fi  
done  

if [ ${#FLATIMGS[@]} -gt 0 ]; then  
  ${FLATIMG_VIEWER} "${FLATIMGS[@]}"  
fi  

if [ ${#PHOTOSPHERES[@]} -gt 0 ]; then  
  echo TOTO  
  ${PHOTOSPHERE_VIEWER} "${PHOTOSPHERES[@]}"  
fi  

I like to put all my scripts in a ~/scripts directory in my home directory that I added to my PATH. What follows assumes the script resides in /home/user/scripts.

Also, the script - and the explanations below - assume spherical images are only in JPEG format. I only use JPEG for photospheres personally. If you use other formats, adapt the script and the installation as needed.

This script assumes you have Gtk installed, and your default image viewer is gThumb. Replace the xdg launcher gtk-launch and/or the viewer org.gnome.gThumb to the launcher and image viewer of your choice.

If you want to reuse the default image viewer to view JPEG images, you can find out which one it is currently set to by doing:

xdg-mime query default image/jpeg  

• Make the script executable:

chmod +x ~/scripts/auto_open_image_as_normal_or_photosphere.sh  

• The script needs a .desktop entry so it can be used as the new default application for the image/jpeg mimetype: create ~/.local/share/applications/auto_open_image_as_normal_or_photosphere.desktop with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]  
Name=Automatically open image as a normal image or as a photosphere  
Exec=/home/user/scripts/auto_open_image_as_normal_or_photosphere.sh %U  
MimeType=image/jpeg  
Terminal=false  
Type=Application  

• Finally, change your default viewer for the image/jpeg minetype to the script:

xdg-mime default auto_open_image_as_normal_or_photosphere.desktop image/jpeg  

And that's it! Now when you open an image in your file manager, SphereView will be used to view it if it's a properly-formatted 360° image, as shown in the video.

360° camera owners know how insanely delicate the lenses are. This is a 3D-printed cover to protect the lenses of a Ricoh Theta X camera, a base to bolt onto something heavy to create a stable stand and a variant to mount on a selfie stick.

I shot this one this morning. Nice spring equinox sunrise on our lake.

This is the last 360 video I made this winter, to show a friend how to cross-country ski in the skate style. This one is the full unreframed 360° video. I just edited it to obscure my face, repoint it and lower the resolution so I wouldn't overwhelm my PeerTube instance.

Unfortunately, the PeerTube player doesn't support 360 videos, and it won't anytime soon from what I read on the PeerTube github. So you'll have to download the video locally (choose Original file when downloading) and play it with a player that does, such as VLC.

I can't seem to find a video sharing site that has a 360 player:

• DailyMotion's used to play 360 videos, but it doesn't anymore.
• Vimeo requires age verification with a government ID so they can stuff that where the sun don't shine, to put it politely.
• YouTube works but I refuse to use Google services.

If you know a video sharing site that supports 360 videos and isn't a privacy nightmare, I'd love to know!

I found this about a month ago, for viewing equirectangular projection images.

Wikimedia has a collection of images that can be used with this viewer.

Here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Equirectangular_projection

And here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:360%C2%B0_panoramas_with_equirectangular_projection

Uses the mobile phones sensors to move the image around.

Welcome to the 360cameras community!

This is a place to discuss 360° degree photography, video-making, specific cameras, editing and of course sharing cool 360 photos and videos - also called photo and video spheres.

Making panoramas and full 360 photos, and occasionally 360 videos, is one of my hobbies. I find those interactive immersive photos fascinating. And on a practical side, they're great to share details of places you want someone to inspect at their own leisure, like buildings in the construction industry or houses in the realty business.

Strangely enough, there doesn't seem to be any community dedicated to this topic on Lemmy. So I figured I'd create one.

And to start with, I'll share photos I shot this winter during my last cross-country trek. I hope you enjoy 🙂