The beginning of the year has been busy. That’s why the big 3.0 update for Photo Sphere Viewer is not here. However, some of you sent me emails to give me ideas and other enhancements. And that’s a good idea!

Anyway, Photo Sphere Viewer 3.0 won’t be here soon. That’s why I decided to make a new small update, with small new features “fast” to implement. Here is Photo Sphere Viewer 2.6!

More natural movements

Since the very first version of Photo Sphere Viewer, the user can navigate through the panorama with their mouse. It was possible to control the speed of this movement, but it wasn’t really natural. Well, not for everyone.

That’s why I thought about a new way to move the panorama, more natural. Now, when you navigate into the panorama, you don’t move the sphere: you move a point.

It’s pretty simple: the point under your mouse is moved following your movements. The speed of the movement is yours.

If you don’t like this new movements you can retrieve the old ones, which still be maintained, with the option smooth_user_moves set to false.

A new way to manage cropped images

At the beginning, Photo Sphere Viewer was here to read panoramas taken by Google’s Photo Sphere. Now, it’s not the case anymore. More precisely, we can read any panorama.

The problem is that Photo Sphere clearly indicates into the file which size should be the panorama if it was complete (if it’s cropped). That allows PSV to retrieve the entire sphere in the right dimensions.

With the other panoramas, it’s not always possible. That’s why I added the option pano_size to define these dimensions. However, this idea was not so easy to use.

But I found a new method. With the option captured_view you can now define the captured angles of vision, those represented by the indicated image. As we know the maximal angles (360° and 180°), it’s easy to retrieve the entire sphere.

Horizontal and vertical angles can be indicated (one, the other or both). For example, if you only capture a 270° × 100° panorama, indicate:

captured_view: {
	horizontal_fov: 270,
	vertical_fov: 100
}

An overlay image

Finally, an option allows you to add an overlay image, over the panorama. With it, you can add a logo in a corner for instance. This option is named overlay and is an object which admits several parameters.

The first one, image, is required: it’s the image to display (URL or path). If the indicated image is too big (or too small), you can tell to Photo Sphere Viewer to resize it with the sub-option size (an object with width and height properties, as in CSS).

A last argument allows the control of the place of the image: position. It’s sub-option x controls the horizontal position (left or right), while y controls the vertical position (top or bottom).

What’s next?

Talking about overlay images, there’s an option asked by more and more users: being able to create tags and other indicators into the panorama itself, to target elements.

It’s pretty cool to see that this option is awaited, as I think about it since a long time now. However, I think it ill be easier to implement with Photo Sphere Viewer 3.0, and that’s why I prefer waiting for before implement it.

About Photo Sphere Viewer 3.0, I’m still working on the engine. I recently fixed a big bug, but it isn’t ready.