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”.