Hi all, I wrote something similar in the past, but I would like to resume all the tips here.
We are discussing about how to take great 360 using your smartphone and Street View App.
Ensure you have enough battery: if a low battery popup will prompt while shooting you could lose all the progress done
Ensure to have enough free archive space and RAM, as stitching phase take a lot of resources; if not, the result could be an incomplete stitching, without any chance to recover
Always, always, rotate YOU around the phone (ideally around the lens), and not the phone around you; this will reduce the parallax errors for near objects. You can attach a string to the phone, and attach a weight to this string, pointing the ground; you should keep the weight always in the same position.
If you can, avoid near objects (furniture, rocks, etc.): stitching is always critical in these situation. Inside shots are always critical in this way
If you can, avoid having moving people around: the result could easily be a disaster of legs and heads all around your pano or duplicates. If you want you can play with duplicates, but try to place each people in just one single shot
Avoid excessive contrast in the scene; the stitching process also perform some normalization, resulting in a overall good exposure, but this function could not make miracles
Ideally, put your smartphone in airplane mode, before start shooting the photosphere: an incoming phone call or a message could stop the procedure, resulting in an incomplete 360
Last but not least, not all smartphones are suitable for 360 photography, due to the lack of gyroscope or compass; some are simply bad in doing this (i.e. my Google Pixel 2 XL is a disaster, maybe due to the bad compass) and some others are great (like my iphone 7)
I will add other tips as long as I find or remember.
It is good to see that you are still helping your fellow Local Guides in every way that you possibly can and I commend you for your efforts and for the way you make new users feel at home and included.
I’ve been avoiding this micro-managed “forum” for some weeks now and have only really missed the human contact which has still managed to survive in spite of all the relentless and impersonal, force-fed corporate hype and the unhelpful attitude of those who were appointed to provide support and advice to the Local Guides.
Ironically the local impact of map editing is gradually becoming stronger and the simple, face-to-face interaction with local charities and new businesses is helping to establish a growing sense of wider community in the terrestrial world and Google Street View and Google Maps (rather thanConnect 2.0) is playing a major role in that process.
Although I was initially very keen on 360° photospheres I have come to the conclusion that for most purposes - other than immersive nature photography that creating a standard (non 360°) video on a rotating tripod is usually more than sufficient to establish a location as well as to display the inside of a particular building and so that is what I have been concentrating on as an alternative.
There is an absolute 30 second limit on the length of such videos but that still leaves scope for a degree of creativity.
Now that I have recently obtained a Samsung I might be tempted to explore 360° photospheres via the Samsung Gear 360 add-on but that is no longer a major priority since zenith and nadir views are interesting as special effects but are really not that necessary in most cases.
The ability to add simple 30 second video clips to Google Maps locations is much easier and should be encouraged since it does not require specialist knowledge or additional technologies and can make it a lot easier for people to find their way to specific locations.
Hi dear @aka_R_n it’s something I’ve started to do since 2014, in the beginnings of SVT program, and continued to do when the LG program started acquiring more power and, eventually, incorporated SVT. I’ve been always involved in sharing tips and techniques, despite some collegues didn’t appreciated
Hi sir @LucioV thank you for this nice tips for 360 pictures. This article is really very supportive and helpful too. I will make sure follow your tips for next pictures.
