Using Spherical Photos in InVision

Why is it important?

Images are a powerful way to share a visual reference of the things you manage in InVision, and with spherical photo support, you can provide an immersive experience for understanding the total context of your data. These images are valuable to many users, intuitive to use, and very easy to capture in the field. They can also be used for many different use cases, everything from classroom layouts to asset inventory validation. 

Who should use it?

When you share a spherical panoramic image, other users can pan and zoom around the image to understand the entire 360 context of a photo. This interactive experience helps convey the entire environment as opposed to one limited shot.

• Classroom Layout - Many Universities take multiple photos of classrooms from each direction so that they can convey the layout and equipment. A spherical image provides a single continuous view of the layout, and can optionally have multiple spherical images to show different configurations.
• Pre/During/Post-Renovation - During floor renovation projects it’s not uncommon for crews to take photos of the project area before they begin, during the project before sheetrock/drywall goes up, and the post-renovation. Spherical images of the project would allow them to go back in time and see what’s behind walls.
• Equipment Rooms - Complex equipment rooms are a great use case where you may have a lot of related assets but not accurate locations for those assets. The spherical image would let people visually identify where
• Emergency Planning - A spherical photo is the next best thing to a live video feed, and many school districts have captured spherical photos of all classrooms which are available in 911 dispatch center.
• Lease Negotiations - When viewing spaces as part of lease exploration, it's often useful to immerse yourself inside the space and see how it may have been previously built out.

How does it work?

Upload - To add a spherical image, you will upload it just like you do any other image in InVision. Behind the scenes, our APIs detect metadata that indicates it's a spherical image and then change how users can interact with it.

Image Gallery - When you see a spherical photo in an image gallery, it will look different than the other images around it. To see it in the interactive view, simply click it and the single view will launch.

Single View - Spherical Images in single image view will let a user pan around the entire scene, and optionally zoom in and out as needed. You can see this type of interaction in the video below.

What cameras are supported?

Standard Spherical photos can be captured from a number of low-cost cameras, and a few of our favorites include:

Ricoh Theta SC - A low priced camera with proven image quality 

Ricoh Theta V - A great entry-level camera under $400

Ricoh Theta Z1 - A high-end camera with increased resolution for capturing detail  

It's important to note that we detect spherical images through xmp metadata (specifically the <GPano:ProjectionType>equirectangular</GPano:ProjectionType> tag), which isn't added when capturing 'panoramic' images on your phone. For troubleshooting spherical images without that tag, check out This Article.