Viewing Spherical Photos as Cylinders
Previously, I described an alternative way to represent pointers to spherical photos. Usually they are static online pictures, which works since a hyperlink can then send the viewer to the full, interactive picture. However, another possibility is to make the pointer a physical picture, printed out and maybe even hung on the wall.
The same thing can be done with the spherical picture itself. Ideally, the pictures represent the inside of a sphere, the view one gets when looking around. However, it can be printed on the outside of a sphere, and the experience of viewing it still more or less works.
Such spheres have been made, and it’s possible to order something very near from companies who will print them on pieces that snap together. Also, some people have experimented with mapping the picture to the outside of a cube, which gives six fixed views. That’s obviously less interactive, but still gives some idea.
In many spherical pictures, though, the top and bottom are not interesting. These represent looking up and down. A spherical picture taken outside while standing on cement, for example, would just have sky above and gray below – not very interesting.
This leads to another possibility: removing the top and bottom, straightening the sides, and making a cylinder by printing it on the outside.
Viewing a cylinder just means rotating it so that the area of interest is seen. Seems like this should work naturally.
A small cylinder could be the size of a Christmas ornament, while a larger one could sit on some sort of stand. On a stand, the viewer could easily turn it, approximating the experience of panning left or right in a regular online spherical photo. In addition, the stand could be motorized so that the cylinder moves on its own, just like online versions sometimes automatically pan around.
Going even further, the user could interact with the motorized system to be gently directed to certain views. There are more options for placing lighting inside the cylinder, coupling cylinders, generating the view dynamically from a projector instead of printed, and so on.
It seems like this approach has a lot of interesting possibilities, and I may end up building some to check them out.
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.*
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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.
Read more Parts of the Spherical Photograph Experience
Given the nature of spherical photographs as encompassing a complete view of a scene, one result of this is that they are, by nature, interactive. Humans have a limited field of view and trying to present all of a spherical view in a way that can be seen all at once is only possibly by severely distorting the picture. So the only way for a person to see the whole thing is to interact with it, to look at only a part of it at a time.
For my purposes, it turns out to be useful to describe the different aspects of this experience.
Read more 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”.
Refreshing Whole Reality
After allowing this site to go mostly inactive for the last few years, I hope to renew it with a clearer vision. Long-term, I will probably rebuild it from scratch, but in the meantime, hope to use the current version to work out the vision, do some experiments, and share some photography. As a start, here’s a description of the initial path.
Whole Reality is an exploration of the art and craft of spherical photography* and its use to convey ideas and emotion. This is common with some types of standard photography such as fine art, abstract, and so on, but is much less common with spherical photos.
Instead, spherical photos are normally used to provide viewers with a “you are there” experience by allowing them to look around a scene in any direction. Examples include Google StreetView, showing real estate or hotel rooms, and making immersive games. These applications are useful and fun, but still leave plenty of room for new artistic expressions.
As a result, there’s an opportunity for new thinking to develop this capability.
Read more WWP Transportation
This is the Albany train station, a transportation hub in the mid-valley. This was taken for the WWP Transportation theme.
Thompson’s Mills 2
This is the interior of Thompson’s Mills. Read more
Albany Carousel
This is the Albany Carousel. Read more
United Presbyterian Church Albany Interior
This is the interior of the United Presbyterian Church in Albany, OR. Read more