Keith Robertson • Panoramic Photographer

How to interact with the 360 images

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Interactive 360 Photo Spheres


I've long had an interest in creating the best quality 360° images. I really enjoy getting to fairly remote places and bringing these images back to share with everyone who cares to look.

When viewed on a screen I think it's great to be able to interact directly with the image and study bits that are of interest to you. With the development of tablets and smartphones the touch interface adds something to this experience which is different to using a traditional computer, keyboard and mouse in my opinion.

The images are either stand-alone or work together in a collection.

With a stand-alone image you can move around in a circle, including up and down and zoom in and out a bit. It's like being inside a huge sphere where my camera was on its tripod.

Collections of panoramas or spheres are called VR Tours. This is where there is some way to move from one place where I setup the tripod to another, all within the same screen. The way this is done can vary quite a lot.

Top Tips


On your phone or tablet…


On your computer…


I can Skin the Panoramas with buttons, maps and sliders to make finding a particular node as painless as possible:

Menu Buttons look something like this:
buttons
Experiment with them to see what they do. The order and functions will evolve over time.

Mapping looks like this, shows you where the pano was taken and its orientation, all clever stuff.
map
The map is interactive in that you can click on a hotspot on the map to go to that panorama. It's a standard Google map so you can pan around, change the background, zoom, etc.

A thumbnail slider is also available, the ticks show you which panos you've looked at already:
slider
I've linked the Map and Thumbnail buttons so that you can't see both at once.

Some of the tours include interactive elements in the 360 panoramas, such as: clickable buttons revealing text boxes, photos, sound or video.

Right-click in a Panorama window to explore even more options. You can change the Projection here too, though the controls are a little strange 😵

Screenshot 2017-06-18 13.29.26

So there you go, have a look around at some of the places I've been very fortunate to visit.