Forget panorama photos; the new Next Big Thing is 360 degree video as taken at the moment on special cameras from Kodak, Ricoh and Giroptiic among a few others.
And they don’t really need a specialist VR helmet to view them as Google has added support for 360-degree videos to YouTube, This lets viewers view streaming videos while choosing their own viewpoint. These could be used of course by proper VR headsets down the track.
While only a few videos have been made available on YouTube, if you use the Chrome browser, the video can be seen inside the viewer and navigation inside it implemented by the mouse or the arrow keys on screen. For smartphones, there is an Android app letting the smartphone control the angle of view and an iOS version is “coming real soon”.
More technical details have been provided on the YouTube Creators Blog, along with a script that can be run on the video file to insert the correct metadata for it to work properly.
