What are these photos on 360cities.net?
You're looking at 360 panoramas.
They could be also be called 360° panoramas, 360-degree panoramas,
omniviews, VR photos, virtual reality panoramas, sphere panoramas, etc.
but we call them "360 panoramas" or simply "panos" here on 360Cities.
Panoramic photography of some kind has existed for more than a century. You can see many examples of 360 degree photos from 100 years ago.
Nowadays you can see a boom in this kind of visualization technology
due to the ever-reducing cost of the technology, availability of
software, abundance of publishing tools. One of the most important
aspects is also that the broadband internet made it possible to easily
share this kind of photography with others. 360 Panoramas are the new way of showing places, events and businesses on the internet.
Three flavors of panoramas
In terms of the format of panoramas, there are essentially three different kinds:
- Partial panoramas
that you know mainly from traditional landscape photography. They are
created by stitching (assembling) of multiple normal photos together
side-by-side, which creates a photo with much wider angle that would be
possible with a normal lens.
360Cities does not support partial panoramas. - Cylindrical 360º panoramas
- One notch higher are 360° photos which capture the whole field of
view in all directions around the photographer. These are sometimes
called cylindrical panoramas. They cover 360-degrees around but not up
and down view. These are too created by stitching multiple photos
together. The only real difference from partial panoramas is that you
need to make sure the first and the last photos overlap. There are also
so called "one shot" 360-degree lenses but they are by definition very
low quality compared to the traditional stitched panoramas.
- Spherical panoramas
are the top of the line which not only capture the 360-degree field of
view but in which you can also look up and down. They can even be taken
in a way that you can't see the tripod nor the photographer's shadow in
the picture.
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