...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!