360 mode

Gaia Sky includes a 360 mode where the scene is rendered in all directions to a cube map. This cube map is then projected onto a flat image using an equirectangular projection. The final image can be used to create 360 videos with head tracking (see here)

Hint

To activate the 360 mode, click on the icon in the camera section of the controls window. Exit by clicking again.

Hint

L-CTRL + 3 – Can also be used to toggle the 360 mode.

Configuration

Please, see the 360 mode section.

Creating panorama images

In order to create panorama images that can be viewed with a VR device or simply a 360 viewer, we need to take into consideration a few points.

• Panoramas work best if their aspect ratio is 2:1, so a resolution of 5300x2650 or similar should work. (Refer to the Screenshot configuration section to learn how to take screenshots with an arbitrary resolution).

• Some services (like Google) have strong constraints on image properties. For instance, they must be at least 14 megapixels and in jpeg format. Learn more here.

• Some metadata needs to be injected into the image file.

Injecting panorama metadata to 360 images

To do so, we can use ExifTool. We will inject the metadata with the following command:

exiftool -ProjectionType="equirectangular" -UsePanoramaViewer="True" -"PoseHeadingDegrees<$exif:GPSImgDirection" -"CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels<$ImageWidth" -"CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels<$ImageHeight" -"FullPanoWidthPixels<$ImageWidth" -"FullPanoHeightPixels<$ImageHeight" -CroppedAreaLeftPixels="0" -CroppedAreaTopPixels="0" image_name.jpg

Now we can enjoy our image in any 360 panorama viewer like Google Street View app or the Cardboard Camera! Find some examples in this album.

Panorama image captured with Gaia Sky