Displaying 360° Images

There are a lot of different solutions for displaying 360 degree images. In this guide I will try to cover the most relevant ones, and how to use them.

Web Based Solutions

To display your image on the Google Cardboard, just upload it to any website that supports 360 degree content and navigate to the location of the upload on your phone. There are a few different free solutions out there.

www.2vr.in

2vr only supports monoscopic 360° images, but provides you with the cleanest viewer of the free services that I’ve tried. To use 2vr, just navigate to their upload page, and upload a monoscopic equirectangular panorama. You should be directed to a website where you can view your image afterwards. Open that page on a Cardboard compatible device to view your image in VR.

www.360cities.net

360cities is another free website for uploading your images, but unlike 2vr.in, they support stereoscopic panoramas. In my opinion their viewer is slightly worse than the one on 2vr.in, so unless you need stereoscopic support, I would recommend the former.

www.facebook.com

Facebook has the ability to display 360° images, but if you just upload an equirectangular panorama, it won’t realize that it’s a panorama at all. It needs to have the correct meta tags for Facebook to identify it correctly. To fix this, use 360toolkit.co’s meta tagging tool.  Simply pick your image, and it will output a version with the correct tags for Facebook. Now all you need to do is upload your panorama to Facebook like you would any other picture, and it will correctly identify it as a panorama, and display it as such. Unfortunately the Facebook viewer does not support VR viewing.

Host it Yourself

If you want to have full control over your own image, you can upload it to your own website. For Wordpress blogs there are two different solutions. If your blog is hosted on Wordpress.com, your blog should already support VR images. There is a guide on uploading them right here. If you host your own Wordpress blog, you can install the plugin called WP VR View to add support for VR images to your website.

Here is a render of the castle I worked with in the previous tutorial, shown using the WP VR View plugin. It can be viewed in VR by opening this page on a Cardboard compatible device.

If you don’t use Wordpress, you can look into Google’s VR View.

To view your images on a GearVR all you have to do is move your image file onto the phone you are planning on using, and opening the image through the Oculus 360 Pictures application.