fbpx

Last week of April, I was at King and Queen Hotel Suites in New Plymouth, taking 360 VR photos to promote the establishment as an Accommodation Support Partner to Taranaki Arts Trail, as part of the annual 3 day Artist Open Studios event in June 2018.

Sharing 360 degree photos on Facebook on YouTube seem pretty straightforward. And I started to research on how to embed these media onto a web page.

There are plenty of options, and the web researcher in me had to scowl for the best practice, applications, hosting and social sharing available for these stunning 360 images.

Self hosting option
The first article I read was from Google and it takes about needing to add scripts and using Javascript API on code and host the files somewhere else of viewing.
It then requires the web developer to add image as an iframe with html.

The easy way:

Other way is to use 3rd party application providers that allow you to upload the file and then generate a html file for embedding.
There were a few providers out there. Theta360, the device manufacturer has sharing uploads but caps files at 5MB, so not ideal for 360 video captures.On the Theta360 forum, one user mentioned that he noticed that 360 degree video uploads onto YouTube had varying results.
‘Videos play fine in 360 on YouTube, but the embeds seem to sometimes work and sometimes not when put on pages elsewhere.’Another user advise to ’embedding 360 photo on a website using Kuula’ https://blog.kuula.co/embed-editor-on-kuula/

I have noticed that some VR videos on YouTube have logos embedded on it and videos are being edited and stitch as this is starting to get more popular and mainstream to reocrd and post 360 media onto 3rd party applications providers with player app, like Kuula, if you need to add your own logo to the embed, you will need to get a PRO (paid) subscription as a service.

My mission was to look for a provider that offer an easy upload and sharing solution, which allow setting the orientation of the image, ability to auto-pan around the image when it first loads and potentially create a collection of images that link to each other as a virtual tour.

So here are my test embeds for two of the images I captured.

1st embed I have used is from 360player. 360player.io


The 2nd embed is with roundme.com/ which provides virtual tour and multiple panaroma pictures shown as a collection. To get a pro embed, it cost $15US for the lifetime.

roundme.com

They also offer a full screen version.

It was first to sign up and claims to be forever free to use. There some first to add as you would when you upload any media on to a hosting provider for web. There was title, description, tags fields to fill in. However I was disappointed at the orientation the picture has default to and could find easy way to lock the viewing orientation the the right angle that I wantedhttps://360player.io/.

This third one embed is from Veer.tv. 360 photos are uploaded as individual files, with description and #tags field options.

Frames can be resized easily. This image of the Premium Suite at King and Queen Hotel Suite is sized at 480px by 350px.