Photospheres at Stony Brook University

Photospheres are awesome 360+ degree images that capture the entire area around the camera.  The most recognizable form of photosphere is Google Maps’s Streetview, which allows you to visit locations and see what it would look like from your car window.  Thankfully, newer smartphones are now capable of capturing photospheres.

Stony Brook University has a VR Tour App you can download for free and use with Google Cardboard or another VR device to take a trip around campus.  The representation of SoMAS-related locations is limited to two images, however.

In an effort to create a virtual tour of SoMAS, I started using the Google Camera App on my Samsung Galaxy S5 to create photospheres of places at SoMAS.  The Google Camera App is available for free on both Android and iPhone:

For Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.GoogleCamera&hl=en

For iPhone: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photo-sphere-camera/id904418768?mt=8

Once you have created a photosphere on your phone, you can upload that image to Google Maps Streetview so that anyone visiting the area can view your streetview image on Google Maps.  Google Maps properly credits the image to the person who captured it, as well.

I took a few photospheres on the R/V Seawolf and now have hosted one of the boat from the Dock in Port Jefferson Harbor.

 

Using instructions provided on this site, I was able to get the proper iframe code to embed a photosphere on a webpage:

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