Get Around 360º Hypervideo Its Design and Evaluation

360º Videos

Video has proven to be one of the most effective ways to communicate and present in a rich cultural context a large quantity and diversity of information in a brief period of time (Chambel & Guimarães, 2002). With 360º videos, we are able to deliver an even richer and larger quantity of information than before, that can span all over the viewer. 360º video can be captured with a digital camcorder with mirrored lens and then mapped onto a cylindrical or a spherical projection. In our examples, we use cylindrical projections, where video frames look perspective correct when mapped onto the inside of a cylinder. Figure 1 is a sample of a video frame taken by a Sony Bloggie PM5K Camera during a driving tour in Macau SAR China (a similar video can be viewed in Sony Webbie HD, 2010a). In Figure 2, the same footage is projected onto a long strip of video showing all 360º angles (Sony Webbie HD, 2010b).

Figure 1.

Cylindrical “Tour in Macau” video before projection

Figure 2.

Cylindrical video after projection

We are able to see both buildings, the one in the front and the one in the back, side by side in the projection. The cylindrical projection was actually invented in 1796 by the painter Robert Barker from Edinburgh who even took a patent on it (Yelick, 1980).