If you clicked into this article, you are certainly familiar with photography. Everyone can take photos with their phone. Most phones also have a panorama function that captures several photos and automatically stitches them into one with a wider field of view. What we are discussing today, however, is a spherical panorama covering 360 degrees horizontally and 180 degrees vertically, also known as a 360 panorama, 720 panorama, or VR panorama.
VR panoramas are a new way to display photos in the age of digital photography. They gradually became known to the public as smart devices and the internet developed. VR panoramas are now used in real estate, tourism, online exhibition halls, and many other industries. You can use VR glasses and a smart device to control the view with a gyroscope, or view one directly in a browser. Do you know how a VR panorama is captured?
I have been involved in panoramic photography for about five or six years. Back then, consumer one-shot panoramic cameras were not yet very mature. Today, panoramas can be captured in many ways. The simplest is to download a panorama app and shoot handheld with a smartphone. It is very convenient, but a phone makes it difficult to control the perspective relationship among multiple photos, which can lead to imperfect stitching. Overall exposure is also difficult to control in scenes with a very high dynamic range.
To solve the inconsistent perspective relationship caused by handheld shooting or an ordinary tripod, 360 panorama heads appeared. This type of head adjusts the camera’s position along the XYZ axes, keeping the lens nodal point—the optical center—fixed in space. No matter how the lens rotates, every object in the scene remains under the same perspective relationship. That ensures both seamless stitching and image sharpness. In post-production, software such as PTGUI is used to place control points and stitch the images, resulting in high overall image quality. The drawback, of course, is the huge amount of post-processing. Like phone shooting, this approach is not well suited to places with many people or rapidly changing environments such as a beach.
For convenient non-professional shooting and use—recording everyday life and travel—a one-shot panoramic camera became the best choice. As technology and demand have developed, domestically made Insta360 cameras have become very mature and convenient. They can complete the job easily, even producing an HDR photo with one click.
Ultimately, whether we use a phone to shoot flat photos or a panoramic camera to shoot VR panoramas, both are ways of using technology to record images. We can choose the appropriate technology and equipment according to our actual needs. Just as the development of phone cameras has made recording images much easier, I hope more innovative technologies and products will make recording life more convenient and true to reality.
Above, we introduced three ways to shoot VR panoramas: with a phone, with a camera plus a panorama head, and with a one-shot panoramic camera. Each method has different advantages and disadvantages, so we need to choose the equipment and method according to our needs in order to complete the panorama.
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