Newbie questions about 360° panorama photos

I’ve just started on Mapillary, coming from Panoramio. I’m a Sony A7RII photographer using the 16mm wide view of the Zeiss 16-35mm, 1st edition. With this equipment I’m able to make quick 360° panoramas (stitched with Microsoft’s ICE) with 12-14 photos. But in cathedrals and other buildings I cover the whole interior both horizontally & vertically with photo takes. Microsoft’s ICE is able to stitch them and the result is mostly quite impressive.
Now my questions:
Does the Mapillary viewer enable looking upward & downward, apart from the usual horizontal turn-around? I’m used to upload complete 360° panoramas (made with ICE) as one photo : are they recognised as such by the Mapillary viewer?

Until somebody gives a more qualified answer, here’s a blog post from 2014: Now Supporting Panoramas and Photo Spheres - The Mapillary Blog. But it’s about panoramas that are uploaded as single pictures, not stitched before uploading.

Yes, see the link in http://forum.mapillary.io/t/capturing-360degree-spehrical-images-with-android-device-for-mapillary/521/7

Thanks, this up & down view is already OK for me. In the past there existed ‘Google Views’ and there I’ve uploaded numerous 360-panoramas made with ICE, that were recognised and confirmed. I also make sometimes 360-panoramas with Photoshop’s photomerge, but that’s not a real merry-go-round stitch as in ICE. I will continue to upload both the separate photos and the stitched panoramas, so we have the best of both worlds. :sunglasses:

I like to make semantic segmentation :slight_smile: between 360 and spherical pictures.
It is sad that mly does not allow tilt with pictures that could be vertically connected ( = not the same as stitched).

Agreed, but with 360 pictures made from 16mm photos one almost automatically creates a sphere. But I make vertical 360 panoramas as well. You mean to say that they cannot be handled / shown with Mapillary’s viewer? I would like to have a joystick possibility (that would be a joy :heart_eyes:), especially in cathedrals + a zoom in/out possibility.
Will vertical 360 panoramas that are tilted to the ‘normal’ horizontal level be process-able in Mapillary?

@TxllxT 360 panoramas are supported on mapillary. Take a look here for an example:
https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=40.778016666666666&lng=-73.93474444444445&z=17&pKey=QQ0rM7bpEIKhMnxqtNmxqA&focus=photo

Pan and tilt by dragging and zoom with mouse wheel / track pad (you can do all of these interactions with reqular images too by the way).

Can you explain what you mean by vertical 360 panorama?

Yeah, that’s what I mean (your 360 panorama)! With a vertical panorama I mean a 360 stitch of photos that follows a vertical line, like for example the main nave of a cathedral. You start down on the floor near the choir and the camera goes up towards the vaults, then turn around 180 degrees and continue the camera movement from high up in the vaults down towards the organ and end again on the floor. So the resulting turning axis is horizontal. After processing (I use Microsoft ICE freeware or Photoshop photomerge) it is possible to tilt this whole ‘London eye’ into a horizontal plane. My preference however would be, that Mapillary is able to follow the circle movement down-up & up-down.

We will not be able to support the panorama type you describe for a number of reasons:

  1. When tilting towards the pole we need to stop the rotation close to the poles of the photo (when looking straight up or down) to avoid turning upside down. With a panorama like the one you describe there would have to either be a discontinuity when tilting towards the poles to be able to switch view to the other side or turning the camera upside down. Take a look at 360 example above for a reference on the stop tilt near the poles behavior.

  2. The equirectangular format Equirectangular Projection - PanoTools.org Wiki does not support this kind of pano. It can only be cropped like here Photo Sphere XMP Metadata  |  Street View  |  Google Developers, not wrapped over the top edge like you describe.

What you should be able to do though is to take two different panoramas, one looking at one direction from floor to ceiling and another looking at the other direction from floor to ceiling. That would give a similare experience but in two photos instead of one.

Hope that helps.