VR Photographs | Whole Reality Photography

26

May

New Ways to Engage With Spherical Photos

In an earlier essay, I talked about the different pieces of a spherical photograph experience. Here, I want to look at the static introduction image piece a little more closely.

Spherical photos are inherently interactive because humans cannot see an entire sphere at one time without severely distorting the image. Before interacting with the image, people often encounter a representation of it that is static. This is often a thumbnail image of one portion of the whole sphere. Occasionally, it may be most or all of the sphere as a highly distorted image.*

Spherical Photography as Metaphor

Spherical photographs provide rich ways of exploring remote locations and giving a “you are there” experience. But in addition to photographic value, they also offer an interesting metaphor for seeing our world more clearly.

To understand how the metaphor might work, consider the following illustration.

Spherical Photography

On this site, I will use the term “spherical photography” to refer to pictures that capture the photographer’s view in every direction – 360 degrees around, and 180 degrees up and down. In other words, the image is a complete sphere with the photographer (or camera) at the center.

They are typically viewed in a web browser or mobile app with the viewer panning the view around the picture to see the whole thing.

Google Street View may be the best known example, but they are also commonly used for viewing real estate and hotel rooms and playing some computer games.

Unfortunately, a variety of other terms are also used to describe the images, including photo spheres (Google), 360 panoramas, 360 photographs, virtual reality (VR) panoramas, VR photos, 360 images, interactive panoramas, and immersive panoramas. Various other combinations of the terms are occasionally used, but these are the most common.

I’m less interested in the immersive, virtual reality, or interactive aspects of the images, even though they are certainly involved. Those evoke the way the image is experienced rather than the image itself, and I want to explore alternate ways of experiencing them.

Also, the term “panorama” seems confusing to some people because it generally evokes a wide photograph, typically used for landscape photography. However, even though these pictures are as wide as one can get, they are generally viewed in an aspect ratio that matches typical photographs.

One of the things I hope to explore on this site is the relationship between spherical and flat (planar) photography, which is a little different than creating a “you are there” experience.

So, given the observations above, my particular interests, and the fact that there is no single standard name, I decided to use “spherical photograph”.

30

Sep