Using the Samsung Gear 360 (SM-C200, 2016 model) with Mapillary

There is another github project, “gear360reveng” focused on reverse engineering of the cameras firmware and its communication in “normal” mode. Using Android, it’s trivial to capture the bluetooth traffic that can then be viewed using Wireshark. Analysis seems to be in very early stages, however.
Samsung is using a Samsung Accessory Framework (custom GATT service) even for a plain thing as bt remote shutter. See http://developer.samsung.com/html/techdoc/ProgrammingGuide_Accessory.pdf

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I’m going to look into this in the States.
Do I understand correctly that this unit won’t work with the Mapillary app?

Anyway, since i want to take pictures at a short interval i suppose i can use the camera.takePicture command and not transmit the picture to the phone.

Edit: According to the spec, camera.takePicture takes a equirectangular image so it appears the stitching is done at that point.

@JBTheMilker correct, it does not work with the app.

@Sphereo problem is that they don’t seem to follow the spec. Maybe it’s better after a few firmware updates, I have’t tested in since we got it.

If you could share the test results from the last time you had a look, that’d be great!

I noticed a typo in the API last year, I haven’t checked if it got fixed by now.

I took already 50 000 photos with the gear360 cam, mounted on my bicycle helmet.
I don’t like the original gear360 app, because it is painfully slow and uncomfortable. Better idea for me, to take the photos with “Gear360 value kit” remote control, do not using the phone. I can taking photos every 1 second. Usint this metod there are no geotag and direction in the photos, so I must correlate them with the gpx track, recorded my phone.
I’m using the JOSM software to correlate geotag to the photos, and python script to interpolate directions, or the JOSM mapillary plugin

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I have the remote control from the value kit as well - are you saying you just press the button manually once every second?

I did that for a trip when I had the camera mounted to the car roof however I didn’t think it was something I’d be doing for a long time.

I’m taking photos in the forest, there are not many sense taking photos in every 1 meters, only if there are something interesting, curve, tourist sign, table, beautifull place, etc… I take 500-1000 photos on a 30 km long trip, it is many work geotagging the photos, edit the maps, making poi-s, set the surface and smootness of the highway, etc… :smile:
And I upload the photos to the google street view too - it is also many work.

For examble we have made a trip Lackenhof - Lunzer see - Waidhofen
I took 1000-2000 photos, edited the map, (new tracks, set the surface, smoothness, etc…), uploaded the photos to mapillary and google street view

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May be a bit late in joining the Gear 360 (2016) party: just bought one last week, at approx. half the price of the LG 360 which I had and returned October 2017.
Impressed with the output : more pixels, better contrast, much better low-light / nighttime pics on lit streets performance.

Both the LG and the Samsung save their output in the form of two adjoining spherical images - spheres you’d expect from a fisheye lens, joined on one side means they’ll need to be split before converting them into a 360 panorama.

Additional advantage that they capture what’s overhead and underfoot, from zenith to nadir for those who may be interested.

Advantage for me as a contributor and mapper at OpenStreetMap is that one can catch say irregular crossroads in one go, rather than take six or eight separate pictures in all directions, then find Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor won’t stich them into a 360 panorama. Plus that some crossroads are quite busy, don’t allow to stand still and take those eight pics, while setting the Gear 360 to 5secs timer and sticking it up in the air allows me to merely stop one second. Plus that not having to stitch in Ms ICE saves in the order of two minutes per panorama : for me, that’s a huge time saving.

How to process these in batch? Pixelcount of jpg boils down to 2:1 for width:height, crop to square from left edge, save as left pic, then crop from right edge and save as right pic, feed both halves to perhaps Hugin rather than Ms ICE.

Can this be implemented? Undoubtedly. Will it be? Intend to start uploading, perhaps as a separate user for only gear 360 pics, and see whether it makes sense for Mapillary to implement.

Looking forward,

@koninklijke I found this script to make that on hugin, but I don’t know if it works:

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OK, this thread is old, but I want to ask if someone have news or found a way to take interval-photos with 30M (8K). It’s unbelievable. The camera is more than two years old, but there is no other camera (less than 500€) to take videos or photos with 30M (8K)

I (for me) decompiled the streetview apk, to check if I can change something, that the pictures be stored on sdcard, but it is too complicated for me to understand the code.

The StreetView-App have all we need:

  • Connect to camera
  • Take a photo every few secounds (

So there MUST be a way to trigger a photo without pushing the record-button.

It’s hard to learn, that there is nothing we can do or there is nobody who can help us, to create a simple function "take a photo every few secounds).

Is there no way to “extract” the function of the StreetView-App and create an own App or to extract the pictures out of the StreetView-App?

I am still interested as well.

Someone found a way to get a shell on a Gear 360 (2017) - see GitHub - ottokiksmaler/gear360_modding: Repository for Samsung Gear 360 (2017) modding

Perhaps this is a starting point for the 2016 version of the camera as well?
With shell access there should be a way to take pictures at regular intervals.

I believe the Streetview App uses the (somewhat buggy) Spherical Camera API where the camera does the stitching which means it’s too slow. The camera can take pictures a lot faster.

For me, it’s enough and I would be really happy if the unstitched picture will be stored on sd card. Better than nothing.

Thank you for sharing that link!

Find that when I remove the SD-card from the Gear 360 (2016) and insert it into a Win10 computer one can view the photos and transfer them to a folder of one’s choice : would that answer your post, and cause happiness?

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For time-lapsing photos, take a look at this two videos:

i somehow missed there was a 30m consumer 360 camera in 2016, a shame it’s so locked down

Yep, I bought four of them (they can be had quite cheap) so I’m still interested in a nice workflow to use them for Mapillary. My guess is that Samsung sold millions of them (mostly via bundles). For starters it would be great if we could just emulate the bluetooth remote control using a phone app and take pictures at short intervals such as 1 second.

Hi, @sct are you still using the Gear 360? Could you share your scripts and your workflow?