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.

The first and most obvious is viewing the photo itself. There are different ways to do this, but they generally involve some viewport, like a web page, that is manipulated to show different parts of the photo. Typically this is done by using a touch display or mouse to drag the view around and zoom in or out.

Before we manipulate the system though, there is some view that we start with – an initial opening scene. It’s important to distinguish this particular view because it is completely chosen by the photographer. It is where the artist has most control over what part of the image the viewer experiences, because once the viewer engages, they will change the view according to their own desires.

The opening view provides the initial orientation to the photo, may set viewer expectations for the rest of the picture, may result in an initial emotional response, may encourage the viewer to change the view in a particular way, and so on. As such, it’s an important element to be considered when presenting a spherical photo.

However, there is one even earlier experience that the view may encounter – a static image that represents the sphere. For example, this may be a thumbnail that represents the sphere in an online gallery, or a picture in a blog post that goes to the interactive one when clicked, and so on.

These images may be the same as the opening scene, but are sometimes different. One common variation is to show a view of the whole sphere such as part or all of the equirectangular view. This is highly distorted, but gives the viewer some idea of what is in the whole photo.

The static view shares some attributes of the initial view, such as being a first experience for the viewer. There are probably different ones, but this needs more thought.

As an example, imagine a spherical photo of a flower garden. The static thumbnail view in a gallery may be of a single flower with text explaining that one can click and view the entire garden. The picture of a single flower, a zoomed-in view from the sphere, is a teaser that there is more to see. The opening view may be of the entire bush containing that flower, expanding that initial impression, but also with parts of other plants arranged to encourage the view to move around and see more. The viewer then experiences the rest of the sphere by panning and zooming around.

So the three experiences that need to be considered are: a static thumbnail (if used), the opening view, and the interactive experience itself.