What you are seeing here are a number of images of Kingston, all shot with an iPhone 5S, using either Google Street View (those would be the less stellar images) or Sphere, both free apps in the Apple store.
The purpose of this experiment is to see how much can one do in 360 and virtual reality with essentially all free tools.
The images were stitched together using MediaImpression, though you could easily use whatever video program you have. You could even use Windows Movie Maker (and convert it to MP4 with a free converter or even uploading and downloading back from Youtube).
You can see the black bars as black circles above and below because the images were not tall enough for the widescreen video format (I am trying to see how much I can do with free software so I’m willing to cut some corners, sometimes literally).
I then added the 360 metadata (with a free program from Google) that tells Youtube (and Facebook!) that the video is, indeed, 360.
So, if you have an Android, you can probably see this in virtual reality with a Google Cardboard viewer or something similar.
I have an iPhone, so I use the Homido app that allows users to see everything in virtual reality.
The iPhone's Youtube app currently doesn't support virtual reality, though you can now see these videos in 360. That is expected to change soon.
The Facebook 360 version now works in Phones as well, and since the social network owns Oculus Rift, I'm expecting to see Virtual Reality there as well.
360 Kingston
Posted by Ivan Lajara on Saturday, November 14, 2015
