I’ve long been interested in 360 panoramic photos and videos and being a patient tech consumer, I was fortunate to get the 2016 Gear 360 camera for the low price of £80 shipped; 22% of the original launch price of £350.

image of the SM-200

Additionally, I wrote a simple 360 web viewer, so I can use any image host (e.g. Imgur, Dropbox, etc.) and not be tied to a specific online platform like Kuula.

Images

You will have to install Hugin manually rather than via brew cask install hugin as the cask formula usually is out of date with the official releases. Go here to find the latest binaries: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/latest/download

Once installed, clone this project https://github.com/ultramango/gear360pano. Now you can use the HuginStitchProject tool installed as part of the Hugin package to use the template files gear360sm-c200.pto (if using the Gear 360 SM-C200 camera) to stitch your dual fish eye photos together to form a spherical 360 photo.

  1. Open the HuginStitchProject app
  2. Select the PTO file
  3. You will be prompted to enter the name of the output JPEG file.

Note: You can either edit the PTO file and change references to “dummy.jpg” to “your_input_filename.jpg” or simply rename your input file to “dummy.jpg”.

Uploading to Facebook

You can use exiftool to add metadata so Facebook (and possibly more social media in the future) can recognize the image and use the appropriate viewer on the platform.

# Install exiftool
brew install exiftool

exiftool -ProjectionType="equirectangular" photo.jpg
# 'photo.jpg' is the photo you want to tag

Video

Haven’t figure out a way to get multiblend to compile on OSX so we’ll have to use an alternative projection tool.

We can use this tool to roughly convert a 360 video https://github.com/raboof/dualfisheye2equirectangular

Follow the instructions to compile gcc -o projection projection.c -lm and then ensure that the command to generate the mapping file is taking the correct dimensions of the video input.

e.g. If the MP4 files are in total 2560x1280 then the command would be ./projection -x xmap_dokicam_video.pgm -y ymap_dokicam_video.pgm -h 1280 -w 2560 -r 1280 -c 2560 -b 35 -m samsung_gear_360 vs the example given in the project instructions

Use ffmpeg (install via brew install ffmpeg) to convert your video file: ffmpeg -i movie.mp4 -i xmap_dokicam_video.pgm -i ymap_dokicam_video.pgm -filter_complex remap out.mp4

Uploading to YouTube

If uploading to YouTube, use Google’s SpatialMedia metadata injector tool to allow YT to identify the upload as a spherical (equirectangular) 360 video. https://github.com/google/spatial-media/releases

Useful code + apps