I often forget to cross-post things between my project sites, so let’s do that right now.
I bought my first digital camera (an Epson PhotoPC) in 1996. I have had many others since then. In addition to photo cameras, I also had various camcorders including my first digital camcorder in 1999. It recorded digitally to 8mm video tapes (Digital8 was the format, I believe). I have also experimented in 3-D, with a NuView camcorder attachment (what a beast that was) and some other gadgets, and some 360 photography.
For 360 photos, you could originally just use a normal camera and take photos in all directions then “stitch” them together using special software. You can find examples of that in some 2002 photos I took at an Illinois Renaissance festival.
There was an early attempt to do “one shot” 360 photos by using a half mirror ball on a rod, and attaching that to the lens of a camera. You would shoot with the camera pointed up, which captured the mirror ball and all things going on around it. Those images could be processed back to panoramas with special software. I had a gadget called SurroundPhoto I experimented with back around 2005.
In the mid-2010s we started seeing consumer 360 cameras made by companies like Giroptic, RICHO and even Kodak. I have had a variety of those in recent years and am currently using an Insta360 X4.
Sharing 360 photos and videos is not easy. Facebook supports them, and YouTube supports video, so I created some Facebook Groups for sharing photos (I made them groups so others could share theirs’s as well) and new YouTube channels for sharing videos.
If you have ended up on my site for Insta360 topics, maybe you will want to pop by these groups/channels…
VR videos on YouTube:
- https://www.youtube.com/@BransonInVR – Branson, MO.
- https://www.youtube.com/@DesMoinesInVR – Des Moines, IA.
- https://www.youtube.com/@ParkHoppingInVR – Theme Parks and such.
- https://www.youtube.com/@WisconsinDellsinVR – Wisconsin Dells, WI.
VR photos on Facebook (post your own there, too):
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/@bransoninvr
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/@desmoinesinvr
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/@parkhoppinginvr
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/@wisconsindellsinvr
Until next time…