360° Media  |  Google VR  |  Google for Developers (2024)

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360° media, consisting of 360° videos and images, is a great way fordevelopers to enhance traditional apps with immersive content. You can embed a360° video into a travel app to provide viewers with an Underwater scubadiving tour as they plan a vacation, or into a home-building app that takesprospective buyers on a virtual walkthrough of their home before it’s built.

Although 360° media supports true stereoscopic VR playback throughcompatibility with VR platforms like Google Cardboard, it can also be displayedin a simple “magic window” that can be viewed from desktop browsers and mobileapps without any special VR hardware.

Common formats

You can create 360° media in either mono or stereo format. Images and videogenerally need to be stored in the equirectangular-panoramic (equirect-pano)format, which is a common format supported by many capture solutions.

Mono 360 uses a single pano.	Stereo 360 uses two stacked panos.

360° images

• 360° images can be stored as png, jpeg, or gif. We recommend you usejpeg for improved compression.

• For maximum compatibility and performance, image dimensions should be powersof two (e.g., 2048 or 4096).

• Mono images should be 2:1 aspect ratio (e.g. 4096 x 2048).

• Stereo images should be 1:1 aspect ratio (e.g. 4096 x 4096).

360° videos

• 360° videos should be stored as mp4s encoded with h264.

• Mono videos should be 2:1 aspect ratio.

• Stereo videos should be 1:1 aspect ratio.

  See Also

  LizardQ Viewer | LizardQ

• Some older devices cannot decode video larger than 1080p (1920x1080). Ifmaximum compatibility and quality is a priority, we recommend that developersprovide both a monoscopic 1920x1080 video and a stereo video at 2048x2048 orhigher.

For Android and Web developers, VR View allows you to embed 360° media intowebsites on desktop and mobile and native apps on Android.

• VR View on Android
• VR View on the Web

For iOS developers, the GVRkit library (provided as part of the Google VR SDK for iOS)provides similar functionality and includes samples demonstrating its usage.

• Panorama demonstrates how to embed 360° images.
• VideoWidgetDemo demonstrates how to embed 360° video.

Media capture

Here are some basic guidelines for how to capture and host 360° media.

Real world capture

There are multiple options for taking 360° photos and videos that supportthe equirect-pano format described above. These options include:

• Cardboard Camera App:This app for Android allows users to quickly capture 360° images. To usethese images with VR View,download the image, and then use ourconversion tool to create a stereo 360° image that meets Cardboard's imagespecifications.

• Ricoh Theta: A very popular,relatively inexpensive solution for capturing mono 360° images andvideos.

CG capture

Imagery for 360° media isn’t limited to captures from the real world. CGIsoftware can generate 360° images and videos for everything fromarchitectural walkthroughs to movie previews. Some of the most popular capturesolutions are listed below:

• 360 Panorama Capture for Unity:A free, easy-to-use 360° capture plugin for Unity.

• Unreal: Stero panoramic capture in Unreal.

• (Unsupported) Domemaster3D:A free solution for capturing mono and stereo 360° images from Maya / Autodesk 3ds Max.

• Renderman:Open-source library for capturing 360° content.

• Rendering Omnidirectional Stereo Content:A whitepaper for anyone interested in writing their own 360° capturesolutions.

Hosting

You can host 360° videos on YouTube.The advantages of hosting on YouTube are:

• Ease of use
• Large built-in audience
• High-quality hosting infrastructure

Alternatively, you can host the media on your own web server via HTTP/HTTPS.