How do they make the 360 degree / virtual views?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Track 16 Gallery Past Imperfect Show by Richard Nielsen

Is it stitched still photos or video?

Thanks

 

[Duncan Brown]

That certainly looks like a video shot with an ultra-wide lens to me.  Why would there be a need to do it any other way?  Those old "virtual 360 degree view" programs, where you could navigate in any direction to view the entire surroundings of a space.... those were done with numerous fisheye still shots stitched together and viewed using special software,  Which you had to do that way, to allow the user to control it.

Duncan

[Phil Rhodes]

If it's a still it's fairly straightforward; you can shoot a huge number of photos and there's software that'll more or less automatically stitch it all together.

Video is tougher. In order to appear to be of reasonable resolution, 360 degree spheres need to be very high res; it's one of the more reasonable applications of 8K (and beyond) in video, and of course you can't just take a load of photos with a still camera. 

There are now GoPro-scale devices that have one camera facing forward and one facing back, each with an ultra wide angle fisheye on it. Stitching is automatic and internal; they produce files that go straight into a 360-degree viewer. The results aren't generally suitable for very high end work but they're fun for YouTube. There's software that will create a stabilised HD frame out of the resulting sphere, too. With any array there will always be errors when things start getting close to the camera.

P