360 Camera Techniques

GAMIFY YOUR 360 PHOTO: How to BOOST engagement by turning your 360 photo into a simple puzzle (free software)

GAMIFY YOUR 360: Boost engagement by turning your 360 photo into a puzzle
GAMIFY YOUR 360: Boost engagement by turning your 360 photo into a puzzle

How would you like to boost engagement for your 360 photo? You can do that by gamifying it and turning it into a simple puzzle. Here’s how you can do that with a free app.  Here’s a sample (click on the dialogue box to make it go away).  This was shot with a DSLR using VTE 2.0 (give it a few seconds to load):

Here’s another sample, shot by Bernd Kronmuller:

To turn your 360 photo into a puzzle, you need to use PanoPuzzle, an app by Bernd Kronmuller.  Bernd reports that with Panopuzzle, average engagement time is 2 minutes 30 seconds, which I believe is quite good.

Here’s how to create your own Panopuzzle

Step 1: download PanoPuzzle from github and extract the zip file.

Step 2: create cubefaces for your 360 photo.  You can do this in PTGui or websites such as 360 Toolkit.  In 360 Toolkit, it will take a couple of minutes after uploading the file.  Note: when I tried toolkit, there were errors in the cubemap conversion.  I used PTGui instead.

360 Toolkit can convert an equirectangular photo to cubemap faces
360 Toolkit can convert an equirectangular photo to cubemap faces

Step 3: convert each of the cubefaces to JPG, if they’re not already in JPG.  Make sure the files are named top, bottom, left, right, front and back respectively, e.g. top.jpg, bottom.jpg, etc.

Step 4: paste the cubeface files (do not change the names) into the images subfolder of Panopuzzle.

Step 5: upload the Panopuzzle folder to your server.

About the author

Mic Ty

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