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.*
In either case, the most typical use is a fixed image on a web page that represents the sphere and the user takes another action to experience the sphere itself. The other action may be to click on the thumbnail, click on an associated link on the page, or go to another page or site entirely. The initial picture is the user’s first introduction to the sphere, but isn’t interactive.
An image on a web page seems the most obvious way to present a static thumbnail, but there are many other ways to experience pictures – in a book or magazine, hanging on a wall, in a greeting card, in a calendar, and so on.
An obvious question is how viewers might go from those experiences to the interactive sphere.
For example, if the viewer was given a URL, perhaps printed on a card or on the wall next to a hanging picture, they could go to the interactive sphere on their phone, tablet, augmented reality glasses, or whatever. (Some device like that is needed to view the interactive sphere.)
However, this experience seems clumsy because typing in URLs by hand is an inconvenient process.
Instead, a QR code, associated somehow with the picture, could encode the URL for the interactive view. QR codes are increasingly common as a way to share links.
Different ways to associate the QR code are possible: pictures printed in a magazine or book could have a QR code printed nearby, hanging pictures could have the QR code on a nearby sticker or on the frame, greeting cards and calendars could print the QR code somewhere convenient and associated with the picture, and so on.
In order to explore this further, I plan to create some prototypes of hanging pictures with associated QR codes. One idea is to mount a thumbnail picture without a frame, but on a raised backing. Then the QR code would be placed on the side where it’s not intrusive when looking at the picture, but still easily accessible for a cellphone camera. There are obviously other possibilities, but this seems like a good start.
Another way to trigger the interactive experience would be to have someone go to a web site, not specific to the picture. The web site could open the viewer’s cellphone camera and instruct the viewer to point the camera at the picture. When the software detects a known image, it could then automatically redirect to the interactive picture.
A nice implementation would keep the viewer’s perspective of the content on the phone so that the wall and surroundings just disappear and are replaced with the corresponding views in the sphere.
This approach leverages technologies being developed for augmented reality, but is a little different application. While I’m pretty confident this is possible, it’s a little beyond my abilities right now, hence starting with the simpler QR approach.
These examples are just starting points, and there are probably other ways of associating a static thumbnail with the interactive view. There are also other ways of presenting a static thumbnail, such as photos in a wallet, a frame on someone’s desk, on a postcard, and so on.
The point here is to use the decomposition to deliberately develop novel experiences, with the ideas here being just a starting point.
In a future post, we’ll explore possible innovations in presenting the spheres themselves.
* The static image could be a drawing, or some other representation of the sphere. This may be something to explore more later, but for right now I’m going to focus on it being a part of the sphere.